2013/3/22 Pritam Ghanghas <pritam_ghang...@infosys.com>: > Hi > > I would also like to know the status of Qt5 with regard to cross flatform > desktop application. > In particular I keep seeing posts on the mailing list that talk about > animations and openGL Drivers.
You probably refer to QtQuick2 and the "new paradigm" of designing user interfaces with QML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML). Yes, the underlying paint engine was indeed completely re-written (compared to Qt 4.x) and makes heavy use of OpenGL ES 2.0 enabled hardware. With "well-behaving" drivers that should not be a problem. But to get maximum compatibility (with graphic cards which otherwise do not have "stable OpenGL drivers") you can still build Qt 5 on Windows with an underlying Direct3D via a support library called "angle" (http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/ - I think...). In fact IIRC that is the standard of the pre-compiled stock Qt binaries for download. All that said, if I understood correctly that all only affects the QtQuick 2 part of Qt. The "traditional" way of designing desktop applications - namely with good ol' widgets, QPainter and Co. - is not affected. It is still drawn using the underlying OS 2D paint API (however Qt draws most of its GUI on its own into pixmaps, and those are then passed down to the underlying OS paint API - or so I understand roughly). I am sure I got some details wrong above (maybe QWidgets do now also depend on a working OpenGL/Angle implementation under the hood in Qt 5?), but someone will for sure correct me ;) > Here is my main concern, can we do native looking cross platform applications > with Qt5 that do not suffer from strange combinations of Graphics hardware. > And what is the preferred way of doing such native looking applications in > Qt5, qml components, Qtwidgets? My *personal* preference for *desktop* applications (and that's really the only thing I do so far ;)) is clearly QWidgets! I find the parent-child paradigm very intuitive and I *love* the C++ API that Qt offers me to control everything. They look "out of the box" as native as possible. And I don't need a "paper GUI approach where I can scribble all the way over in whatever colour that pleases me". And I detest *custom* animated windows and other UI elements ;) That has somewhat become "acceptable" even on Mac OS X (which otherwise has traditionally had very strict design guidelines in the past) with those sad "skeuomorphic apps" (oh, how I /love/ that word 'skeuomorphic' - look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph :)) - but we all heard the outcry in the OS X community, and Scott Forstall is now gone (http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/30/skeuomorphic-design-or-one-reason-we-can-be-thankful-scott-forstall-is-gone/). That said, there is off course also an attempt to provide *desktop friendly* elements to QML. But in my opinion that is like re-inventing the wheel, because one will end up what we already have - QWidgets - except you need to deal with editing XML like QML files (*yikes* - I'll never understand why someone would prefer to edit GUIs in that way ;)) and even JavaScript ("Run away! Run away!" - http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7n9y4VJhc1rvvt9fo1_500.jpg). Or you say "You don't have to edit QML by hand" hand you use the Qt Designer - and again you end up with exactly what we have today: Qt Creator and *.ui files (but you'd probably still need to deal with JavaScript in one way or another: "Run away! Run away!" ;)) However: if you *really* want to do "custom GUIs" - for embedded systems or whatnot - then QML is probably just the right tool for you! Cheers, Oliver _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
