Sean,

>>> P.S. Oh, and get rid of the QTableWidget. Use QTableView instead.
>> What does that do for me in this case?
> Nothing to solve this particular issue. Its just a pet-peeve of mine.
>> My table is very simple, it's basically a read-only table EXCEPT for allowing > the user to check/uncheck items. Maybe I'm wrong in my ideas, but I tend to > view QTableWidget as working pretty nicely for very simple tables like this > but with it you get less control than QTableView. I feel like when I've used

I had to cut and paste this myself so please forgive if I got attribution wrong.

I just wanted to weigh in on the QTableWidget issuing knowing full well it is pretty close to the "What's the best editor" flame war bait. It has been my experience that there are 2 primary camps when it comes to spreadsheets in Qt.

1) Those who think having to write 5000+ lines of code to do a simple thing is great! 2) Production coders (most often salaried employees) who have 12 other projects scheduled to complete before they will be allowed to take vacation.

Admittedly Camp-1 tends to be a younger crowd reading all of the high minded books and papers trying to become one with the original OOP Object from whence all other objects came. In a less politically correct time people used to day they spend much of their day sitting cross legged on the floor in a white smock, palms skyward, eyes closed, chanting oooooohhhhhhhhmmmmmmm in an effort to achieve this enlightenment. Those who don't get such a reference will have to watch a lot of 1970s and early 1980s movies with characters like that, not that getting the reference is important.

Camp-2 has a release schedule which was chosen before the spec was written. Even if, no, especially if you are an hourly contractor you need to bang it out fast. You have one month to do a system which would ordinarily take six months before it got to internal alpha testing. Management is going to award higher billing rate contracts to those who pulled off a miracle last time. When your primary life goal is to be able to retire before the mass quantities of caffeine and nicotine cause you to expire increasing the billing rate is about the only way to do it.

Management, especially if they hold an MBA tends to know nothing about software development. They just have these charts and graphs showing progress or the lack thereof and make decisions based on them. All they really know is the Windows/Java/etc. developers have these controls they can just drop in and configure 800 ways to Sunday so a full blown spreadsheet with most of the features of an OpenOffice spreadsheet gets added as a requirement at the 10AM meeting and those developers have it in the code base before lunch.

Putting it in non-IT terms, since I'm currently getting a starter rebuilt for my WWII era forklift

Camp-2 tends to believe they don't need to know how to build a starter to install one in the vehicle they are working on. They only need to know where to get it and how to install it. Camp-1 believes you should assemble the starter by hand from parts which have to be milled to fit together to make a perfect starter. The extreme members of Camp-1 believe you should harvest the ores and coal yourself, smelting the metals to hand craft the perfect starter to fit in the opening and align with the bolt holes on the engine.

Now that I'm on the shadier side of the hill I'm more deeply in Camp-2 than I ever was. I worry less about project deadlines than completing all of the projects I want to build before the dead deadline.

If my statements about drop in controls seem dated that would be due to the fact the last time I touched the virus known as Windows VBX controls were all the rage. My personal belief when I got into Qt having moved from Zinc Application Framework and several others before it was that we (the community) would have an ever increasing number of highly configurable widgets to drop into our applications. That belief has not proven to be the case, but, it was my belief nonetheless.

During my youth Assembler, COBOL and BASIC ruled the business computing land and FORTRAN ruled the scientific world. Camp-2 dwellers worked with this high level languages while Camp-1 dwellers worked in Assembler trying to squeeze every cycle out of a processor by getting as close to one with the metal as possible. There are still some bare metal programmers out there and God love them. Without them we would not have BIOS or UEFI or any other kind of built in firmware, but the big things don't get written like that.

Qt has been occupying a weird place. Originally trying to create something for desktop applications which could be cross compiled to many platforms, it has slowly been pulled more into a Camp-1 type of orbit. It tried to bow to the fact most kids in school are script kiddies these days, rarely taught much in the way of 3GLs and structured design when it created QML. For battery operated things QML is a horrible choice because scripted languages have a higher run-time burden on the processor. I don't see that changing until we finally get to the place a fully charged smart phone drains its battery 10 minutes after your application starts. We seem to be getting closer to that day with each passing hour.

Oh well, just my 0.0002 cents.
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