[Qt-interest] Qt5 and XML DOM

[Till Oliver Knoll]

Am 11.05.2011 um 18:42 schrieb Konrad Rosenbaum <konrad at silmor.de>:

> Would the summit in Berlin be a good place to chime in for us die-hard lovers 
> of old and un-sexy features like widgets and DOM?
> 
Yes, that was exactly my keyword: "un-sexy features - and QWidgets"!

I must insist(TM) ;) that the "old-fashioned" but very proven and widely-accepted widget approach is neglected in favour of "klicki-bunti" (german expression ;) user interfaces "which look everywhere the same"!

Don't get me wrong: I am talking "desktop applications" (and I intenionally say "applications" and not "apps"), and I /do/ see a use of QML even on the desktop: for "fixed size toy apps or games".

But other than that I want my Qt application to look, feel and behave as closely as possible according to the underlying OS.

Now I do see and respect the argument of "declarative UI design". But what's wrong with the "interactive design" with the excellent Qt Designer"? Yes, there seems to be an attemp to "support QML in Qt Designer", but that looks like re-inventing the wheel for something we already have.

Now I totally agree that when it comes to "animating the UI" it is indeed easier to do that with declarative design. But my point is: as a user I don't want that! As a developer I don't need that!

Concrete example: I am evaluating Lightroom 3.4 (an application to manage and index huge collections of photos) on Mac. Yes, I must agree I was a bit impressed in the beginning about the "sexyness" of their dark-stylish UI. And they do have fading and moving elements - cool.

Yes, it doesn't quite look like a "Mac application" (but then again: even Apple does visual experiments lately), but the dark-coloured UI makes sense for an application where the colours of the photos count mainly.

That said, the next thing I noticed was that the presets for photo development were a huge linear list, instead of some (freely configurable) tree structure or the like. Then my shared network folder of my other Mac was not recognised as such (LR has its "own filesystem view", as it seems, which does neither seem to support NFS mounted drives nor "Apple Shared Folders").

Bottom messages: the eye candy was eaten after 10 minutes! Then I thought "Had they invested more on usability the application would be even better!" (It's still a great tool, don't get me wrong ;)

And if the application had been written in Qt everything would have been possible with QWidgets and a bit of CSS for the dark background colours. Animating the tabs with "QAnimation" classes would be relatively easy (when compared what the application is supposed to do). And on feature request lists I read "face recognition, HDR, separate control curves per colour channel... but I have never read "Please animate the UI more and make it more sexy!" In fact, I have never read such a request for /any/ application, from /any/ user!

The only persons that I came across or read about mentioning "sexy UIs" was some former boss ("I've heard Flash/AIR apps are very sexy - can't we port our Java client app to that?").


So here's a suggestion: improve the QGesture support in QGraphicsView (I've been told the current architecture doesn't really support the needed event handling well, on Mac for example). Improve OpenGL 3 support ("core GL context" with no deprecated GL functions. Add proper SOAP support. There are more examples which would bring a real use to applications.


Qt NEEDS to be UN-SEXY! It needs to provide the BASIC building blocks and a fast and reliable abstraction for common OS functionality. Please KEEP it like this - let us Qt users write the sexy parts ;)


Sorry for the lenghty post here - just trying to fight the "we need every 3 years a new technology (which does the same as the previous one, just under a different name), so we keep starting over and over again, just slower and with the same bugs we already had fixed in the previous technology"-thinking ;)

Happy coding,
  Oliver