[Development] Question about Qt's future

[Attila Csipa]

On 21-Apr-14 18:14, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Em seg 21 abr 2014, às 15:31:57, Yves Bailly escreveu:
>> QML has its merit, it's certainly perfect for some projects. But for all
>> I've seen and tried until now, only for projects having a rather simple UI.
>> For really complex UIs, QML seems not suitable - at least for now.
>
> So our effort goes into making QML suitable.

It's a bit tricky. Traditionally, Qt did UIs by mimicking/drawing the UI 
elements itself. This is cool, as it's allows for those native looking, 
but also super-customizable (and quite fast) UIs. Or, rather, this used 
to be cool. It's still VERY good for embedded and custom UIs requiring 
that pixel perfect snappy UI (also the reason why it fares so well in 
the consultancy/solutions business). But. Unfortunately platforms have 
diversified, UIs look/act more different than ever (and it's not going 
to change). This is, indirectly, IMO the reason why Qt Quick Components 
took so long, why they (pardon my French) suck, and why they will suck 
in the foreseeable future, and why I think Qt is (still) so far behind 
in mobile. It seems nobody has the bandwidth to reimplement ALL the 
controls/look'n'feel for ALL the platforms, so they would feel native 
and integrate with the Qt apps seamlessly. This would be OK if Qt was a 
game engine or not trying to have a general application framework 
appeal. The current mobile examples demonstrate IMHO this quite clearly 
- they do have a "I want this" appeal on a first run, but when you 
scratch the surface you see these are more like Potemkin villages than 
solutions to cross platform mobile development :( After playing a bit 
with Xamarin (yes, I know, but put aside the C# hate for a minute), it's 
quite striking what different approaches can result in (and it also made 
it quite clear what Qt is doing better - but also worse than other cross 
platform solutions).

Best regards,
Attila