[Qt-interest] future of a desktop UI

[Jeffrey Brendecke]

* Local fat clients perform better and are more customizable than any general 
purpose engine for processing mark-up. Just compare creating tables in HTML 
vs. what you get with an instance of QTableView on top of the power of the Qt 
Model-Delegate-View framework. With a local fat client, I can write the 
application in anything suitable for the purpose. And it does not even need 
to have a UI.

* Having applications being delivered from a server outside puts the user in 
the victim role. I have seen a number of what were once tolerable web apps 
get modified into something with more flash (and a lot more unwanted 
commericial ads) but that were all the less usable. The user then has to 
either put up with what is delivered or go elsewhere.

* Some of these application runner utilities themselves are so complex as to 
approach being operating systems in their own right. I see tremendous 
problems with security issues and protection of personal information. With a 
desktop system, I can choose the operating system and utilites that have 
proven themselves to be secure and reliable, and maintain and customize it 
myself to process information, whether that information is from a local 
source or delivered over the Internet. With these application runners, I am 
required to use something someone else has decided for me under the 
conditions determined by someone else, or do without.

Qt provides such rich library with so many ways to use it, and compared to 
others I have seen, it is fairly easy to program with, even across platforms 
and through multiple bindings.

I see no reason to try to replace it with something less capable that 
establishes undesirable if not unwanted external dependencies and introduces 
problems and risk that I, the developer and the user, have no control over.

The Internet is a great way to get information but a dangerous place for 
establishing external dependencies, especially when dependencies are being 
established on applications being delivered from the outside. It should all 
be about exchange and processing information in standardized, structured 
formats, not about nice-looking applications that are here today and gone 
tomorrow.