maemo.org - Talk - Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

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- - Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo! (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=50557)

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikhas (Post 619555)

You must have never used a filechooser dialog on GNOME then, from a Qt app. Or try KDevelop on GNOME ... UI is look&*feel*, with *feel* relating to the app's behaviour, and whether its surprising to the user or not. The style plugins still have a long way to go, IMO.

It's way off topic

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikhas (Post 619555)

Well, since you mentioned it, I just went and did it.

One dialog is from GEdit, one is from the Qt Creator instance underneath.

To be honest, they look pretty similar to me. :)

(In other words, you're probably blaming KDE on Qt. Don't.)

[edit: also, if you'd done your research, you'd know that - used properly - Qt uses native file open dialogs per platform. See: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/qfiledialog.html#details]

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Use them. I talked about feel. Not look. There are subtle surprises everywhere.

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

I am not a programmer, but I have friends that are and that tell me Qt is great. But, what amazes me is - whenever the developer/creator/designer (in this case Nokia) decides to implement serious changes to their product, there's always an "old-school guy".

Now, the "old-school guy" is a person who claims that all the new features are somehow bad and that the old solutions were far better. They know what is best for the product - better than the company that actually made the product. Then they give reasons which probably have some basis in reality, but always miss the point. The point being: the product should be good for the majority of people, not for the select few.

I'm not saying all change is good, but I'm saying that no change is definitely bad.

And, as I said, I'm no programmer and most of you guys are. I'm an illustrator and a designer and I got an N900 for its multimedia and web capabilities. I never ran Linux, I spend my time in Photoshop and 3ds max and I use Wacom instead of code to send my thoughts out there. And I'm loving the device and what it may bring. No one has the right to tell me that its hacker-only or whatnot - as I use it daily with much joy and success.

So, here's my non-programmer point of view:

Qt will bring more interested parties (other than Nokia) which will result in more apps, better support, more possibilities.

It will bring more developers (ability to write one code and deliver it to multiple platforms vs the ability to write multiple codes for multiple platforms) which will, again, result in more apps - both from large developers and from talented individuals and small independant studios as it will cut costs for those with limited budgets. Bigger markets for the same development costs.

It will also bring easier usage of multiple devices - if my netbook can run the same software as my MID, than I don't have to adapt to two different applications to do the same thing on two platforms.

It will bring more devices and more choice. Want a HW keyboard? Don't want a HW keyboard? Want a 7" screen or an ultra-portable device?

Ofcourse - fragmentation is the downside. But its PC vs Mac all over again. I would rather have some fragmentation and a choice than have Steve tell me what I want and how I want it. But we all agree on that :)

And some of you are willing to give all that up because - what - you don't like C++?

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Apparently I didn't manage to make myself sufficiently clear. I'll try to inject my comments in your text below.

Quote:

Originally Posted by w00t (Post 619546)

As I outline above, if you're calling Qt on any of today's platforms ugly, then you've the parent toolkit to blame. Qt isn't actually defining that style, it uses existing APIs to render the widgets.

My point was that people use subjective measurements to decide technical issues. Some say that skinning an application is important (I don't), some say that "It's ugly!" looking at a GTK+ (or Qt application) and want to change toolkit over that (which I think is the wrong way to pick the best toolkit).

Personally, I want things to work. And work well. Bling is superfluous junk that drags the code base down making it harder to maintain. But that's just my opinion.

Quote:

I question this. Are you saying Qt itself has these crashes? Because in some years of using it now (often pre-release, I've been using 4.7 on my desktop for well over three months now) and I'm still yet to experience many crashes caused by *Qt*. I thought I found one the other day, and it ended out (after a few days of investigation) to be my fault, not Qt's.

While this is just as subjective a statement as someone saying 'Qt is buggy', I don't think that's a statement that you can claim to *objectively* make without measurement and statistics.

No, I'm saying that business code written outside of the Qt corner is the cause for the many bugs and hard to debug faults. C++ is hard to use well and easy to make mistakes in that are subtle and hellish to debug. Qt in itself hides lots of the magic making it pretty easy to use but an application isn't only the GUI, it's also the business code that actually perform the work when I click on the buttons.

Quote:

I don't see your logic here.

Your point implies that the easiest way to use the power of Qt, is to not use Qt, and go back to all the headaches of C++ that Qt helps relieve you of? (QObject signal/events, most of the details of memory management - unless you want to deal with it, etc).

This doesn't really make sense to me.

It's worth noting at this point that the link of the flaws of C++, while a good read, is actually addressed to some extents *by* Qt.

Here I urge you to go back and re-read my message. I can't understand how badly I put things if you got this impression.

My point is all about the business logic, that is, everything that is not Qt but uses it to get a GUI.

Quote:

It's not even that, so much as people not asking questions, and using knee-jerk reactions based on misinformed opinions.

Really, the best way to get involved in this discussion is to find someone *knowledgable* on both sides of the debate, learn from them, ask them questions, and then you'll have a balanced opinion.

For the record, at least in my experience, PyQt/PySide are pretty useful. I've used them for prototyping a few times.

I try to ask questions. And I try to read very carefully when answered. Sadly I still get the impression that very few think about things other than GUI looks and bling.

When it comes to GTK+/Qt and C/C++ I use my experience and the weakest link here is C++. I have no trouble with Qt, at all. It looks very polished and versatile, as I've stated earlier. The trouble here is directing development more towards C++ in business logic which in turn will result in more developers churning out code that is hard to develop and maintain.

That is all.

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Referring to the thread title, as I often say to my kids, dont say no till you have tried it.
Having tried it, I am impressed with the richness of Qt, its availabilty on multiple platforms, and accessability to learners via PyQt to gurus who want to go all MVC stylee.
documentation is excellent, lots of examples and Maemo integration is excellent, and very good tool support with the likes of qt designer and eric for python and qt creator for Cpp.

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikhas (Post 619555)

You must have never used a filechooser dialog on GNOME then, from a Qt app.

That's supposed be a coding error, actually. "The easiest way to create a QFileDialog is to use the static functions. On Windows, Mac OS X, KDE and GNOME, these static functions will call the native file dialog when possible." Now, if the developer of the app CHOSE not to use the native dialog (so he could implement custom filtering, etc), that's not the fault of the toolkit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by smoku (Post 619436)

Ever tried writing bindings to Qt library? Not a nice job.
While GObject bindings can be autogenerated using gobject-introspection.

Hey, I actually do that regularly, it's not that bad. QObjects/moc trickery does give you a fair amount of introspection, and all bindings have their 'magic tools' that do the binding generation for them (we've got a full hat of those :) SIP, Shiboken, boost, SMOKE, you name it)

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikhas (Post 619572)

Use them. I talked about feel. Not look. There are subtle surprises everywhere.

I use them daily. Do you have any specific bug reports or example(s) for me to test? As I use a mixed environment, this is an issue I care about, so if there are problems I'd be interested to track them.

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

What has this got to do with 1.2? That seems to have the same UI and apps as 1.1

Re: Say NO! to Qt-based Maemo!

Quote:

Originally Posted by damion (Post 619603)

What has this got to do with 1.2? That seems to have the same UI and apps as 1.1

Absolutely nothing.