[SPLIT] Future of Widgets in Qt
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Actually, I disagree with you on that last point.
On the one hand, there doesn't seem to be a huge "custom" look and feel on the mobile platform as you make it out to be. Yes, it is more smooth and animated, but if I look at the UI's of the apps on my iPhone, they look remarkably similar. And that is (still!) good! It makes it easy to find my way around in new apps, because often (not aways) they work in a similar way as the apps I already know. I think we'll see more standardization in UI interaction on mobile devices too. Maybe not by formal standards or HIGS, but at the very least by the copying of ideas between developers.
On the other hand, there are many platforms where a standard UI has never been much of an issue. Windows is one. Yes, it has some standards, and loads and loads of applications that don't integrate at all, introduce new UI components with every new version (from the same company as the OS, for instance...) or even do weird stuff with title bars and other non-standard tricks. Ever looked at an IM application or a media player and thought that it looked like it fitted the standards of the platform? I for one don't know many that do.
Edit:
I think good QML components are sorely needed. It may be fun coding a button once or twice, but in the end, you want to have these things available. Same goes for more complicated interaction components like choosing an item from a list, selecting a time or a date, grouping options, etc. In this respect, QML is leagues behind the Qt widgets. -
I don't actually have anything against custom look and feel on mobile or desktop applications. As I surely don't have anything against trying to follow UI design guidelines.
It is all about what will make for the best user experience on each individual application. If you write a tool for someone that uses Microsoft Office every day you probably should try to have the application follow all the latest Microsoft published (and unpublished) ui guidelines. If you are writing a game or a media player you should not compromise the experience by trying to have only standard ui elements, menu and status bars, ...
My point being: there is room for widgets and QML.
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For those interested: http://lists.qt.nokia.com/pipermail/qt-interest/2011-January/030637.html
This is a thread that is currently running on the qt-interest list on a bug with QGraphicsProxyWidget being closed as "out of scope". The proposed solution: redo your work using QML. Right...
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[quote author="Andre" date="1295435254"]For those interested: http://lists.qt.nokia.com/pipermail/qt-interest/2011-January/030637.html
This is a thread that is currently running on the qt-interest list on a bug with QGraphicsProxyWidget being closed as "out of scope". The proposed solution: redo your work using QML. Right...[/quote]
I've read the thread and I find it quite alarming the way things seem to go. Since the aquisition of Qt by Nokia it is all about mobile development and each time I read articles like these my fear gets worse that traditional desktop development will be left out.
It took years for Qt to get stable for desktop development, I sincerly hope they don't expect people to switch for desktop development to QML, or any other for that matter, they have still a long way to go. Every release seems to add features and change the behavior of others. I want the code I write today to behave more or less as expected with the next major release, I don't see that happening with QML?
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I'm too kinda disappointed with Qt focusing so much in QML and forgeting about QWidgets, which are the base of desktop applications..
QML could never replace QWidgets, in fact I think they be focusing on make QWidgets work in QML instead of making a brand new set of QML Widgets. >.< -
I feel somewhat alarmed that such issues are closed as "out of scope" with the recommendation to solve it using QML.
We started to use Qt some years ago, since it is kinda stable and don't think our development team would be happy if the future of UI development is only with QML.
Maybe we should start to write our alternatives-plan if QML is really the way of Qt in near future...
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Yeah right. But what I meant is that it's alarming enough to close the issue because it is out of scope, because it's not considered important.
It makes me think about the behaviour of the maintenance team here at work... if we tell the customer that a bug "is not considered important enough to be fixed at the moment" this usually means something like "hey, we're going to release a new cool feature so you won't need this old and grumpy feature anymore" :)
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[quote author="Andre" date="1295439915"]That QML recommendation was given in the mailinglist thread, not in the closing comment on the bugreport. But still, I found it worrysome (and wrote so in a reply in that thread).[/quote]
The recommendation is even in the bug-reports, I just got the following for http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-9826:
[quote]
Widgets in general is no longer within our scope, especially not widgets with graphics effects, and we strongly recommend using Qt Quick as a replacement for that. Qt Quick 2.0 will have way better support for hw accelerated effects. Hence closing this issue as out-of-scope.[/quote]While it pertains to QGraphicsEffects on QWidgets in a scroll area, Quick/QML might be more suited to that specifically, but shifting to QML for our entire app isn't really an option.
Yes, I am worried too...
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Hey, this entire thread does not mention digia once. As I understand it, it is up to digia to maintain Qt widgets and fix related bugs.
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@Andre: I see.
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@unclewerwerner: Any ideas on how Digia will handle bug reports from the community? qt.digia.com only wants my money. ;)
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Bug reports from the community should go into the "public bug tracker":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com
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There's a quite interesting article "here":http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2010/11/2d-musings.html about some of the advantages of moving to a QML / scenegraph based model for widgets in the future.
I think the qt-components project is going to be very important. Having a good collection of common widgets implemented in qml will go a long way to smoothing the development of consistent UIs for the next generation of devices and applications.
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[quote author="Volker" date="1304346935"]Bug reports from the community should go into the "public bug tracker":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com[/quote]
[quote author="Alexandra" date="1304346935"]Nothing changes regarding maintainership etc. until we have the Open Governance processes in place.[/quote]
Ok. In that case, I hope someone will go through the out-of-scope tickets and review/flag them as "desktop issues" instead, as it might be important stuff in there that's useful for whoever will decide to maintain that part in the future.
The out-of-scope labeling is a bit disheartening tho, but I suppose we all have to wait a bit and see how it pans out. (Very neat website this though. ;) )
