[Interest] My experience porting to Qt5 (on OS X)

Daniel Price daniel.price at fxhome.com
Fri Sep 14 10:26:56 CEST 2012


Yes I've seen all of these problems too and they've been present since Qt 4.6 (a bad release which introduced numerous regressions on OSX).

QDesigner is full of glitches and is in need of some attention; the one where the control panel controls 'float' above the panel comes to mind.

The QPushButton size issue is particularly bad because it interferes with the hit rect such that the button becomes un-clickable a certain resolutions. I recently ported a commercial Qt application which used stylesheets extensively and had been re-skinned with larger buttons; The buttons didn't work unless you clicked right in the center. Our solution was to change every single QPushButton class to a QToolButton!

Also regarding styleheets, just don't use them on the mac. They are horribly broken, particularly for lists, menus and comboboxes.

Another annoying one is the main window focus bug. If you open a native dialog (file picker, color picker etc) and then dismiss it, focus is not returned to the calling window. I had to write a QApp event filter to fix that.

Still these are not Qt5 specific issues as far as I'm aware.

-----Original Message-----
From: interest-bounces+daniel.price=fxhome.com at qt-project.org [mailto:interest-bounces+daniel.price=fxhome.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of Till Oliver Knoll
Sent: 13 September 2012 17:38
To: Qt Interest
Subject: Re: [Interest] My experience porting to Qt5 (on OS X)

2012/9/13 Stephen Kelly <stephen.kelly at kdab.com>:
> ...
> Anyway, my advice is: Don't use module includes.

Yes, and we'll  leave it at that ;) I think this academic discussion about ordering and forgetting to remove #includes went on long enough:
I do see your points and agree with you on them. However the points you mentioned are a non-issue for me.


Anyway, back to the Mac ;) Am I the only one observing graphical glitches on both OS X 10.6.8 (iMac mid 2008) and 10.8.1 (MacBook Pro 2010)?

For instance when in Qt Designer (on 10.6.8) and adding some widgets to the form (notably push buttons) without layout, and then resizing that form (dialog), I get terrible flicker (especially the push buttons seem to flicker between normal and scaled size). Also the elements seem to be scaled during the size change instead of just remaining at their place. After I terminate the resize action the widgets are repainted at their normal size, but sometimes overlap.

Other issues are with the "GL Info" helper tool ($QTDIR/bin) which when started on 10.8.1 does not show any content (just some frame borders, but no text) when first started up. Only when I resize (or
hide/show) the window the text is rendered. However starting the same tool on 10.6.8 does not show the same glitch, text is rendered instantly (in general I had the feeling that rendering is a bit more "stable" on 10.6.8 than on 10.8.1 - off course that could be due to the OpenGL driver - in case that is involved anyway when drawing widgets).

In my own application I do change the background colour of some widget, once my main window receives focus: However (again on 10.8.1) I don't seem to be getting the initial "focus" Qt event when launching the application (could be related to the issue with the "GL Info" tool in $QTDIR/bin). When I resize the window however the background colour of that widget changes as expected. Taking away focus from my main window also seems to work (I haven't yet really tracked down that issue, whether I really don't get the focus event, or whether there is another issue).

I'm also seeing the "focus problem" elswhere in my application (I think that one was already reported by someone in this thread, too): I have a simple dialog with a QTextEdit: when I click into that text edit as to enter text the dialog seems to "loose focus" (it's close button is greyed out).


I know, all the above is pretty sketchy and I haven't have had the time yet to properly track those issues down and find a reliable way to reproduce it (however the thing with the Qt Designer is pretty easy for me to reproduce), last but not least to open bugs for all of those issues.


However what are other people's experience? I mean those graphical glitches were pretty easy for me to spot (am I am really just talking about the Qt Designer and some tools and examples I've tried now), but from what I hear from others is that "Qt on Mac is pretty fine"?

So am I the only one seeing dead pixels? ;)


Cheers, Oliver
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