[Development] Qt for iOS - iOSStyle

[Jake Thomas Petroules]

By the way, I don't know if you saw my comments on your "Qt for iOS Preview" blog post, but...

You stated that because there is no HITheme-like API on iOS, that creating QiOSStyle would be "not possible".

However, we can render any UIView into a buffer using [UIView drawInRect:] which we should utilize to provide as much support for native styling as that allows us to.

Jens claimed on the blog that the native look and feel matters less in the mobile world because each app is fullscreen. I agree that it matters less, but I disagree that it matters little enough for us to ignore it. I'd much rather use real iOS-looking controls than simply slap on Fusion. Apple users are commonly noted to be extremely particular about very small UI defects. If we spend the time to go "oh, the text alignment in QLineEdit is one pixel too low on OS X", and actually take the time to fix it, iOS should be no different.

So... why can't we use [UIView drawInRect:]? Qt 5 uses the same approach with NSScroller on OS X for drawing the Lion/ML scrollbars (10c6f015f45092040c281bb90a65179f598a00b1).

Native styling is important wherever you are. Not everything is a fancy web app or fancy QML game with custom graphics. Although I've not tested it extensively, Qt seems to have a completely functional style implementation for Android that look like native controls for the theme my phone uses, and the themes that other phones use, on those phones. We wouldn't want Qt/Android apps to look the same on every device, or like something else.

Same idea with iOS. It has a theme. That theme should be adhered to in order to maintain the same level of quality and refinement that Qt applications are able to achieve on other platforms.

Apple should give us headers and documentation for CoreUI.framework and the _UIClassNameAppearanceStorage classes in UIKit. That would make life a bit easier. :)
-- 
Jake Petroules
Chief Technology Officer
Petroules Corporation · www.petroules.com
Email: jake.petroules at petroules.com
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