Slashdot Mirror
Screenshots Of Qt Designer
an Irie KDE user writes "This page shows some screenshots of Qt Designer on various platforms. Qt Designer is our visual user interface design tool. Technically, it is just another application written with the Qt GUI Toolkit."
"Which is fine, until ms updates the appearance of the GUI, or some third party does it (and there are several who have - chroma, windowblinds). When this happens, Qt apps will stand out and probably look pretty ugly, compared to the rest of the system. Think of those boring grey stark bevels sitting inside something like Apple's Aqua, because it doesn't pick up on the *real* native appearance. Ugh. I'm all for fancy interfaces, but please: *consistent* fancy interfaces. Developers and toolkit vendors have to keep that in mind."
If you aren't using the OS's native toolkit, this will always be a problem. Many apps suffer from this program, and it's not just third party software. For example, Microsoft Office on Mac OS and Windows does not use native widgets on either platform for everything.There are countless other examples.
They seem to have invented there own for widgets specfically for the program where needed. This certianly does break WindowBlinds, Kaliedoscope, Color Themes, etc. That's why I avoid themes, and try to go with the native color. If figure that way it has been highly tested, and should be consistant (if the UI developer had half a brain).
Qt and KDE by far are the hardest working widget set/desktop when it comes to trying to match one widget set to another one. Qt apps on Windows, is very similar to the MFC widget set. The screenshots show this is also true on other platforms.
People ask, why don't you just use the native widget set in the first place for everything? That would certainly make everything very consistant. But it would limit the design of advanced features and ease of use, by limiting ideas to one company. Not to mention that often the native widget sets API is difficult to program for, or clumbsy.
Good cross theming as you pointed out, isn't perfect, but it's a good start.
Among other things, he talks about pros and cons of both GTK and KDE themes. He also the future of KDE styles up to and beyond the KDE2 release, and gives his take on recent XFree86 developments.
From the screenshots, it didn't look like it to me. Admittedly I've done a lot of multi-platform GUI work, and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, but it just didn't "fit in" quite right. Qt seemed to suffer from the common problem where everything is just *slightly* the wrong size. You don't notice it until you see the application alongside others on the same platform, but once you do, it's one of those niggles that becomes an annoyance every time you use the application.
IMHO the attacks against GNOME were pretty out of line too, to say the least..
You'll see some suspicious dissing of Gnome on that screenshots page. Please understand that this is a statement of Trolltechs, not of KDEs. The KDE guys themselves (on their mailing lists) reacted to the dissing.
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I've to admit that the real advantage of GTK is that it's C-based, so it's much easier to do language binding. GTK has really a lot of support for alternate languages like ADA, Eiffel and such, but the applications implemented in these languages are still missing, so most of the language bindings are for now more a proof of concept.
For Open-Source software Qt is the way to go (easier to program), for closed software development GTK is the choice (because it's LGPL and free of charge for proprietary software) if you don't expect to get to get any money for your GTK program. Otherwise, Qt is still better because it will save valuable hours of programming time compared to GTK. Remember, the license costs of Qt include one year of free support, where can you get that for GTK?
Am I the only one who thinks that all the "multi platform" (SUN, SGI, Motif) screenshots are actually done on Linux with apropriate Enlightenment themes? Except for Win2K, maybe :)
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For those that did not know: KDevelop has has a design tool for quite some time. As far back as last year at .4 (can't remember farther). Granted it didn't do as many features as this did, but it was very good and I have used it (the designer and KDevelop) for over a dozen projects. I looked at Glade at the time to see how good it was and it seemed to be missing things that the KDevelop designer had. Granted that could be different now. For those that missed it TrollTech was deminstrating it at LinuxExpo. I had heard of it before, but didn't have a chance to test it out. I played around on it for a few mintues at the expo. I was quite surprised and when I start my next project will use it. I am sure that I will save quite a bit of time off of development using it. I also took a look at the code that it spits out the end. Formatted nicly even with comments so after I can go in and edit to my hearts content. Over all it is a nice addition to my toolbelt.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
It seems that it has become extremely fashionable to criticize every single detail of whatever might not be absolutely politically correct about QT and KDE. On the other hand, whatever GNOME does is welcomed, even if it is, to say the least, as inflammatory as any of the KDE/Trolltech comments (e.g. Icaza's Unix sucks comments).
Trolltech is a software company that has to make money to survive. And they are writing fairly decent software for that, and provide it for free for non-commercial applications. All they get in return (from the slashdot crowd) is flames. Don't you think that this will make any other company think twice before they provide something for free for Open Source development?
As for the Gnome `dissing': Trolltech already took it off the website in no time. Please read before posting.
As for QT designer: sure there's more toolkits available (Kylix, KDevelop, etc.). But, hey, what's so bad about having yet another one? And for commercial development, 2.5k$ is nothing. A good coder costs heaps more than that (for instance MATLAB, a numerical simulations environment costs $10k for industry and $1k for universities).
So stop complaining and start coding if you want to make a point.
It seems even TrollTech is getting in on the GNOME bashing. I like both GNOME and KDE, but really, that's not the sort of thing I expect to see on a corporate home page. How about a little professionalism, guys?