GUI libraries

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2013-11-30 at 00:10 +0100, Xavier Bigand wrote:
[…]
> available on iOS, with his interface wrote in cocoa. The next version 
> will be ported to iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS X (maybe linux), so 
> we completely rewrite the interface with QML, because to increase the 
> application identity over multiple platforms and provide something 
> really easy to use for customers. Providing an UI that match to mobile 
> ones will remove the apprehension of users instead of Widgets making the 
> application looks like a professional tool.
[…]

A lot of people are going with QML now that the Trolltech → Nokia →
Digia transition is settling down. I suspect Microsoft (inadvertently?)
gave Qt a great boost by telling Nokia to ditch it in favour of
WindowsPhone. Qt is, all in all, about the best graphics system for
platform independent GUIs. The other candidate is wxWidgets, but that
seems to have lost a bit of momentum compared to the increased momentum
of Qt and especially QML. Gtk isn't really an option on Windows, nor
really OSX.



On Sat, 2013-11-30 at 00:23 +0100, Xavier Bigand wrote:
[…]
> QML and mostly Qt Quick Controls are really young technologies and 
> certainly not finished. The important things of Quick Controls is
that 
> it provides the default skin of the OS and the correct behaviors, but 
> It's preferable to adapt it to import a custom Skin.
> 
> Digia certainly think that it's important to simplify the transition 
> between old (OS natvie UI) and new (fully custom UI) usages.

Certainly QtQuick Controls are new, but they were needed, QtQuick 1.0
required people to construct their own – definite #epicfail. QtQuick 2.1
seems to be settling down nicely and is a reasonable base for a vibrant
ecosystem.

A section of Canonical is now firmly behind using QML so as to get the
platform independence across all the platforms they want Ubuntu to work
on. That section is also behind Go (instead of Python or C++) and the
QML/Go combination is developing nicely, albeit very young really. A lot
of the sensible and experience-based grumbles about Go come from these
folk.

I am using QML/Go (and QML/Python, two separate backend implementations
based on the same QML) for a pet project (which as a sideline supports
my Python and Go training courses and is research for a possible
startup). I had been hoping to do QML/D as well but the only graphics
engine that is really viable with D just now is GtkD. I may well try a
GtkD/Vibe.d/D version of this but it is really back burner. If there was
a possibility of QML/Vibe.d/D now that would be really interesting.
 
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder