> On Monday 13 February 2012 11:35:59 Timothy Pearson wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>> > Anyway the code path in question has been reworked in 4.8 and uses now
>> > evil
>> > technology coming from mobile devices ;-)
>>
>> I know that this is sarcasm, but it seemed a good place to jump in to
>> the
>> thread... :-)
>>
>> One of the major complaints I have against mobile technology is the
>> widgets in use on mobile platforms.  As a whole, they tend to be larger
>> and have more limited interactivity due to the assumption that they need
>> to (and in fact can only) be tapped with a finger.
> I'm sorry but you are very badly informed. The technology provided by Qt
> for
> mobile development is called QML. It is not a widget toolkit in the
> classic
> way but more like HTML 5 + JavaScript. I recommend to just read a little
> bit
> about it :-) This technology allows you as the developer to decide how
> large
> e.g. a button is. In Plasma we use the same widget API just with different
> backend for desktop and touch allowing us to have large buttons for touch
> and
> normal buttons for mouse/keyboard driven environments like a desktop.
>
> Now your screenshot shows two applications not using QML, two applications
> not
> designed for touch. Aaron already pointed out that QWidget is a very
> stable
> area and has not changed at all.
>
> I am sorry to say, but you really have to read a little bit about the
> technology behind before doing bold statements. It's one of the things I
> criticised in my blog post as you might have noticed - at least I hope so
> :-)
>
> Cheers
> Martin

Actually I do know the differences. :-)  And I do see a gradual trend
towards using QML-like technology in desktop applications.

I ask you this: If QWidget is so stable (i.e. did not change much between
Qt3 and Qt4), why do Qt4/KDE4 applications always use more screen space to
display less information?  Why do KDE4 applications tend to require more
mouse clicks for each operation?

Can you state 100% that the Qt4 developers did not modify widget
parameters to be touch friendly?  You would have needed to be on the Qt4
development team to be able to state this. :-)

Note that I am not claiming to know for certain the causes of the Qt4
widget bloat.  All I do know is that it is present, it can be quantified,
and it is very hard to remove.

Tim