LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 21:55:01 +0930

Re: Re: comparative worth of Qt toolkit and GTK+ ?

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 12:07:41PM +0900, Michael Davies wrote:
> 
> On another (inflamatory) note, Gtk+ is written in C, and has lots of other language bindings.  It uses macros to help with type-safety.  It's small and fast.
> Qt on the other hand, adds extensions to C++ requiring you to precompile your source (with the Meta Object Compiler(moc)).  It also uses a SIGNAL macro which should be named QT_SIGNAL or something else namespaceable.

Michael,

It's strange then that some PDAs are said to use Qt for their X window
system API, when you would have expected GTK+ to be the natural candidate.
Maybe it's just organisational - Trolltech have spotted the "opportunity"
to move into PDAs whereas GTK+ is developed by people who just don't
have the desire to port to embedded systems.
Personally I would have been happy with Xlib on a PDA.

> 
> I've always used Gtk+ - I don't want to use C++ if I can help it :-)
> 

C++ is a bit like classical music - either you get it or you don't.
There are particular conditions under which C++ becomes strongly preferable
to C, which have been debated to death since the mid-1980s (so they don't
require further airing here), and there may be a point in your life too where
you appreciate what C++ offers. C++ supports good software engineering
practices for large multi-author software. When you have a mix of mature
programmers and cowboys|cowgirls, C++ helps to protect the good programmers
from the bad.
That being said, I find that I hate every C++ API I've ever used. I prefer
to write in C++ using a C API. Too many programmers use C++ before they're
ready for it. It's like giving a Stradivarius to a rock musician.

Having scanned through the Qt toolkit API, it looks like it's been created
by professionals, but certainly the non-standard pre-processor and
make-tool put me off a lot, as well as the licensing complexities.

---------------
About the theming business, now that it's been explained to me, I see that
the plain grey look of GTK+ and Qt are due to the fact that I don't
fiddle with theming. (Admittedly SuSE 6.2 did have a KDE theme for some sort
of architect's drawing table which was really delightful, but I haven't
found this sort of grown-up theme in later SuSE versions - just all that
kiddies' stuff with space ships and monsters and things.)

But there's a little paradox here. When I design web pages, I specify no
fonts, no nothing. It's all plain so that the user can choose font
style, font size, colours etc. etc. But then users tell me that 
my fonts are too small or big, and the fonts are too ugly etc.
That's just the user's default settings! But they blame me.
So in the web page context, users expect web designers to provide
all of the styling, but in the X Window System context, the developer
is expected to provide plain grey styling because the user wants to
choose the theming.

In wonder why it is that the balance of power+control between developer
and user is skewed towards the developer in the web context (although
HTML really doesn't give the developer much power over appearance),
and is skewed towards the user in the desktop application context.

Sys admins have sometimes told me that they hate any kind of user
customization. How can a sys admin help 100 users if they've all
customised their interfaces differently? Diversity is clearly
a nightmare for support staff.

Anwyay....

Cheers,
Alan.

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