[Qt-interest] (Qt support salesforce "downgrade", bug priorities) (was Qt for the iPad?)

[Gregory Seidman]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:13:45AM +0200, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 14.04.10 18:04:48, Ross Bencina wrote:
> > Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
> > >As for fixing bugs, that's about priorities: yours and ours will not always
> > >match. The team has a lot to do and fixing the P0s and P1s as well as 
> > >getting
> > >the releases out are very important. (Where P1 means "will stop the release
> > >from happening" and P0 means "stops Qt development itself so stop whatever
> > >you're doing and do this NOW")
> > 
> > While we're on the topic of bug classification... I would like to see any 
> > cosmetic rendering bug which makes an app look broken (ie badly computed 
> > update rects which break redraws) raised to P0. I have had support tell me 
> > that rendering bugs will not be fixed in a minor update because they are not 
> > "critical" enough. This is completely unacceptable. What commercial app 
> > would ship with a redraw bug -- like lines corrupting a widget due to 
> > un-updated regions when scrolling?
> 
> Maybe you're writing apps where 100% correct looks are very important, but
> I think there are apps where the functionality is more important to the
> customer than a graphical glitch.

This attitude may or may not be held by anyone working at Trolltech/Nokia,
but it's exactly that kind of attitude that leads to the mediocre look and
feel on OS X. Mac users expect and require both functionality and polish.
If you can't achieve both, the Mac market isn't appropriate for your
software.

To bring this full circle back to supporting the iPad, read the very last
paragraph of this article concerning the section 3.3.1 change:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

It's a pretty damning reference to Qt. I started using Qt back around 3.2,
and I love it. I even gave a talk at a regional Qt conference near Boston
some years ago. I'd never dream of releasing a Mac app written in Qt,
however. It just isn't up to par. Amazon did, and look what it got them.

I also do iPhone development. A lot of what I like about Qt (signals and
slots, in particular) has analogous constructs in Cocoa (Touch or desktop).
You could argue that it would be handy to have some of the non-GUI portions
of Qt available for porting existing software, but I don't see any
advantage to using Qt for any new development on the iPhone, and I see real
look and feel problems with using any part of the Qt GUI library for any
Apple platform.

Unless and until the Trolls make Qt feel right on MacOS X, I don't think
it's even worth discussing it on the iPhone/iPad platform.

> Andreas
--Greg