So, how's the tablet support?
-
Oh, you mean that kind of tablet. That's a bit more complicated: there are loads of people interested in it, but not many who want to contribute and test the code. You need to ping people at development mailing list or IRC for better information, but it's possible that the code was dropped or at least deprecated.
-
[quote author="sierdzio" date="1368002689"]Oh, you mean that kind of tablet. That's a bit more complicated: there are loads of people interested in it, but not many who want to contribute and test the code. You need to ping people at development mailing list or IRC for better information, but it's possible that the code was dropped or at least deprecated.[/quote]
Well...I'll look into it, since there's nothing else to have a better multi-platform wacom tablet support.
Anyway, thanks for reply:)
-
[quote author="liuyanghejerry" date="1367997376"]I once saw people were considering about removing tablet support in Qt 5.
[/quote]I haven't heard tablet events support being gone in Qt5. Are you sure?
Edit: found it: http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2012-September/006132.html
Sadly, this is not the only productivity oriented feature that is not a priority in the development of Qt. The whole world has gone mad with cheap and quick meaningless eye-candy to the point of ignoring what is really important. Pen input is not only important for graphics professionals, but even to regular people as pen enabled devices become more and more common. It just seems to be the worst possible moment to decide not to support Wacom, considering it is pretty much 99.9999% monopoly on the market.
-
[quote author="utcenter" date="1368050028"]
I haven't heard tablet events support being gone in Qt5. Are you sure?
Edit: found it: http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2012-September/006132.html
Sadly, this is not the only productivity oriented feature that is not a priority in the development of Qt. The whole world has gone mad with cheap and quick meaningless eye-candy to the point of ignoring what is really important. Pen input is not only important for graphics professionals, but even to regular people as pen enabled devices become more and more common. It just seems to be the worst possible moment to decide not to support Wacom, considering it is pretty much 99.9999% monopoly on the market.[/quote]
I agreed. You know that I'm developing a painting software, so I have to wrap the WinTab API myself.
What a pity Qt decided to remove this basic feature even without a real poll on this.
-
Well, if you only target windows, then it shouldn't be all that much trouble, it just would have been nice to have tablet input abstraction in Qt. As for polls, they hardly matter, as do votes @jira, just a quick example, the request to provide Zip archive support has been around for like 4 years and is the most voted one in the bug tracker, and so far there is no response on it. It was supposed to be "fixed" in 5.1 but looking at 5.1 I don't really see it... And it is not like Zip archives are something as rare as pen input users. There are scores of applications for zip archives in everyday life, from compressing/decompressing to working with formats like docx or odt.
-
[quote author="utcenter" date="1368091551"]Well, if you only target windows, then it shouldn't be all that much trouble, it just would have been nice to have tablet input abstraction in Qt. As for polls, they hardly matter, as do votes @jira, just a quick example, the request to provide Zip archive support has been around for like 4 years and is the most voted one in the bug tracker, and so far there is no response on it. It was supposed to be "fixed" in 5.1 but looking at 5.1 I don't really see it... And it is not like Zip archives are something as rare as pen input users. There are scores of applications for zip archives in everyday life, from compressing/decompressing to working with formats like docx or odt.[/quote]
Err...then the problem with wacom tablet seems to be there forever...
Unfortunately, my program targets to support Mac, Linux and Windows. And what's worse, I use MinGW gcc as my toolchain on Windows, whereas the WinTab lib is compiled with MSVC.
But I saw there's a project for Linux. Maybe I can mimic that for Windows.
-
On a side note, the fault does not like 100% with Qt, I've had my fair share of "interacting" with Wacom. Aside from their bad drivers and ridiculously overpriced products, I am pretty sure they don't give a damn about anything but milking people. A few years back there was this initiative to develop software to help blind people learn to speak and write, back then touch devices were not as common and their bamboo series was the one affordable device to provide touch input. However, the problem is that when it "touch mode" the tablet acts like a mouse - the position of the cursor is relative to its last position and not absolute to the screen.
Wacom denied that this is even possible (even though the absolute x and y coordinates are right there in the control panel), then said absolute positioning would make the device unusable, even though I wrote them in good lengths how to make it possible to interact with normal windows content in absolute mode.
I guess Wacom just didn't give a damn about blind people learning to communicate. The same way they don't care about the flexibility of application of their products, the same way they don't care providing a stable API.
I bet this wouldn't be the case if Wacom had any actual competition instead of being a monopoly. Just take a look at Intel - they can hardly do a CPU architecture update without requiring either a new socked or a new chipset, Intel doesn't give a damn about upgradability and would be much happier selling a new motherboard each time. This is not the case with the CPU underdog AMD - which has no position of a monopoly to misuse, and therefore is forced to provide more value for the money and make their platforms significantly more future-proof.
And that is what worries me about Digia - since it is not like there is another product that can directly compete with Qt, they can pretty much afford to do what they want and the developers are forced to accept it as there are no alternatives. Big companies like Adobe or Autodesk already have tons of developers, for them it will be a minor issue that Qt support for wacom devices is bad or missing altogether. It is us, the small time, independent developers that will be impeded by it.
-
I don't mean to blame Qt for this. It's just disappointing that what already had now gone, and I don't see any official statement about broken wacom tablet support before I really stuck at it.
I doubt whether wacom developers even realize this problem. Last time I asked them for MinGW linkage support, the only thing they gave me is a link talking about how to build DLL!
You're right, independent developers are the victims. Now I just...just have no good feeling on this problem.
-
I do believe this is what your looking for. http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/widgets-tablet.html
Note: For any type of Graphics Related work such as Professional Painting Applications. Its best to avoid Qt5,
Qt5 does have some benefits over Qt4 depending on what your trying to do. But honestly they broke sooo much stuff when they started messing with X11 support that its not even worth messing with Qt5.
Be sure to have a look at OpenImageIO (Image Cache Support + 16,32,64Bit Support), OpenColorIO, OpenFX, GraphicsMagick(Magick++), etc.
-
[quote author="zester" date="1368142015"]I do believe this is what your looking for. http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/widgets-tablet.html
Note: For any type of Graphics Related work such as Professional Painting Applications. Its best to avoid Qt5,
Qt5 does have some benefits over Qt4 depending on what your trying to do. But honestly they broke sooo much stuff when they started messing with X11 support that its not even worth messing with Qt5.
Be sure to have a look at OpenImageIO (Image Cache Support + 16,32,64Bit Support), OpenColorIO, OpenFX, GraphicsMagick(Magick++), etc.
[/quote]Thanks, this example still exists in 4.8 but no luck for 5.x. And truth is I've already port my whole program to 5.x :(
Now I'm trying to wrap WinTab API myself...
-
My homemade WinTab wrapper for Qt 5.x: "https://github.com/liuyanghejerry/Qt-TabletSupport":https://github.com/liuyanghejerry/Qt-TabletSupport
Still working on it.
