[Qt-interest] Are there any disadvantages with OT

[David Ching]

<Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch> wrote in message 
news:C10F29AB06447B4881FC0DE1E302E2F2050BA5EFFA at sg000036.corproot.net...
>> Thanks much Sean.  Indeed, I have to learn about delegates, proxy
>> widgets, styles, and stylesheets.
>
> Yes, understood. But ranting about a toolkit you don't know about is so 
> much easier than learning it ;)
>

I suppose I was ranting about the NEED to learn it.



>> 1) .NET is a drag and drop (and endlessly fiddle with properties)
>> experience
>> to get the above.  Qt isn't.
>
> Qt Designer is also drag-and-drop.
>

Yes, presuming there are pre-written widgets to drop!  :-)


>> 2) With .NET the good styling is readily seen immediately.  Not with
>> Qt
>
> Right. Qt widgets are supposed to look NATIVE out-of-the-box. And last 
> time I checked Windows XP/Vista did not resemble those widgets you have 
> shown.

They do not.  But the Office UI is very popular for Windows, and with the 
.NET libraries, I just set the Theme Property to e.g. Office 2007 Blue, and 
that's it.


>If you need this kind of "look and feel", then use
>
> - Stylesheets
>
> - Or even more down to the core: Qt styles (agreed, that is some more 
> work, but you get FULL control about how widgets behave/look)
>
>> whose out of the box UI makes Management not believe in it.
>
> Ah, yes, the "Management" again. Tell me again, these are the people who 
> got trained "in Excel", right? I agree, this can be a nasty bunch of 
> people to convince.
>

LOL,  actually they are not really to blame.  The user, for whatever reason, 
values this kind of look.  Management's job is to provide the users what 
they want.



>> 3)  It's easier to hire a .NET developer than a Qt developer (in
>> USA), so
>> codebase maintainability is better with .NET.
>
> This might be true. Qt is propably (still) more popular in Europe (India? 
> Asia? Africa?). Seems like you are a bit behind here ;)
>

Well, in USA, sexy look and feel is perhaps more valued.  For example, while 
I appreciate the understated look of the Qt website, it is rather plain 
looking compared to the Microsoft one.  Certainly having Microsoft be an 
American company promotes American values.  I think Qt Declarative will 
enable sexy UI, but similar to WPF and Silverlight, and still not making it 
easy to do Office style UI's.  IMO, this is a big part of why Qt is not more 
successful in America.


>> 4) The target audience do not much care about nice things such as good
>> performance, keyboard navigation and accelerators and all the nice
>> things Qt
>> makes it easy to get right.
>
> That's the programmers fault. It is YOUR responsibility to convince the 
> customers/management of these necessities! The customers are not educated 
> computer scientists. They don't even grasp the meaning of "performance", 
> how to measure it (but off course they will DEMAND it later on!). 
> "Accelerator? Isn't that the rioght pedal in my car?" Not to mention "code 
> maintainability" or all these "invisible magic stuff that programmers deal 
> with the whole day". "It just has to Look Good(tm) and there has
> to be a big sticker on the box, "Web-As-A-Service-In-The-Cloud-Ready", 
> right? WRONG!
>
>
> Sorry, I know we are all in the same boat here. I used to face the same 
> questions about all these points. Luckily in my current position customers 
> do not care about "fancy UI". They care about correct results and 
> usability.
>

99.99% of the people use the mouse to click, and use keyboard as a last 
resort.  Programmers, no, but they are not the ones buying our apps.


>> #3 is the root problem.  If Qt had momentum in USA especially for
>> Windows,
>> perhaps convincing management of the rest would be reasonable.  I had
>> hoped
>> when Qt became LPGL, Windows C++ programmers would start to use it
>> more, but
>> judging from the job market (at least in the Silicon Valley, USA
>> area) that
>> hasn't happened.
>
> You can help here - Spread the word ;) Maybe Europe could also help the 
> USA with "Care Packets" ;)
>

I am trying.  On the MS MVP private newsgroups and MS public forums, I 
regularly tell MS and the other MVP's that Qt offers a paradyme worth 
emulating.  I am trying to get Qt the de-facto standard for Windows native 
GUI's.  But since there are becoming more Windows managed GUI's, just 
getting the native GUI market is not as good as if you get the .NET market 
as well.

-- David