[haiku-development] Re: Haiku, Qt and apps, oh my!

> Why would you bother if the Qt GUI works just as good as the "native"
> GUI
> would? Even better, the Qt GUI is maintained by other people and has
> already been tested much more. This is some effect I would see with
> VLC. At
> one point, I regarded the BeOS GUI for VLC the most comfortable on
> any
> platform. That was during the 0.4.3-0.4.6 times. After that, I had no
> time
> to maintain it, VLC being the beast to compile that it is. By now,
> VLC has
> switched over to Qt and the GUI is much better. Instead of updating
> and
> maintaining the BeOS GUI, I'd probably spend the time to fix the few
> remaining annoyances I may have with the Qt GUI and be done with it.

Well indeed the BeOS gui of VLC is quite nice.
The windows one also used to be nice.
I had to install a nightly build recently in windows... The GUI is
really not as good as it used to be. Non native buttons and other
controls, out of place icons in menus... eark. Get me the old one back!

> > > The other problem is similar to the wine effect on linux. There,
> > > having
> > > wine means most window apps will run, so big software companies
> > > don't bother porting them to linux properly. Having Qt in Haiku
> > > could
> >
> > Yes, same problem with ndiswrapper-like things, which gives reasons
> > to
> > vendor not to release specs because "it works with the windows
> > binaries"
> > (except they forget that this is only for x86).
>
> It's just a matter of limited resources. It's just how the market
> works,
> you can't have it another way, or even blame it for being the way it
> is.

Well it's a balance between having it to attract new apps & devs,
having it well integrated, and having it not too good so devs won't
just quit using the native toolkit...

> > > lead to a similar situation. It's meant to be temporary, because
> > > we
> > > don't have enough native apps, but it will last more than you
> > > think
> > > because people will just start to use it.
> >
> > Just about proper communication.
>
> I doubt it. If the Qt port is as good as I hope it will be - why
> bother? It
> depends a bit on what the effects of such a port are. If we get lots
> of
> code duplication and Haiku begins feeling slow because of layers
> piled upon
> layers, I'd vote for phasing out one of the options. Which one we
> will see
> if we ever get there... :-)

Let's get there first :)

François.

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