[Qt-qml] painting

[Alan Alpert]

 Mandag 21. juni 2010 17:54:41 skrev Kamm Christian.D (Nokia-D/Berlin) :
> On Monday 21 June 2010 07:11:38 Allison Warwick (Nokia-D-Qt/Brisbane) wrote:
> > > drawing functions can be very handy for prototyping. At the moment,
> > > you'd be required to dip back to C++ to do these things.
> > 
> > Or PhotoShop.
> 
> Yes, if the image is static. As soon as you have dynamic content, it's back
> to C++ again.

And isn't that the right thing to do? Separating the application logic 
generating the dynamic images and the simple UI showing it?
 
> > > Could something like this eventually become part of Qt's standard Qml
> > > plugins?
> > 
> > No, it's evil, and must be stopped at all costs.
> > 
> > But seriously, why bother with an ugly boring ellipse that takes more CPU
> > than an image (...)
> 
> I agree, imperative painting can't replace snazzy graphics.
> 
> But if you're not a designer, allergic to graphics software, or simply just
> doing an initial prototype that doesn't have to look good, some rudimentary
> painting can be very handy even for static ui components. Otherwise, why
> not remove Rectangle? Surely you could always use a better-looking Image
> instead?

Rectangles are all you need in prototyping. If you really don't care about how 
it looks, then a rectangle looks good enough in all ellipse cases I can think 
of. Just imagine the smooth curves along with imaging the subtle translucency 
and color stuff that you'll add later.

And if you aren't a designer, then you can write your own C++ imperative 
drawing code. Unfortunately we don't expect to write the perfect language for 
everyone on the first try, and so we're aiming for designers and people not 
allergic to graphics software in the first pass (who currently have an even 
worse situation than the developers when it comes to application creation).

While I disagree with Warwick that it is evil and must be stopped at all 
costs, I do think that the potential for misuse is significant and it is a very 
bad area to just rush into. Eventually we might find a way to integrate 
imperative graphics well with the declarative scene graph, but only if we 
haven't already committed to something simpler but less effective.

-- 
Alan Alpert
Software Engineer
Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks