Except that Qt isn't native on the Mac

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Except that Qt isn't native on the Mac
by Frodo on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @11:02

Be careful when making claims. Qt/Mac is a step up from having to run X11 to get the app, but it doesn't use native interface elements, it uses it's own cheesy implementation of the Aqua UI primitives. It looks quite ugly in some cases, especially in Panther, where the old-fashioned tabs look out of place. TrollTech really needs to do better.

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Re: Except that Qt isn't native on the Mac
by anon on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @13:52

I can assure to you that Qt _is_ native to the Mac: in fact, it uses the Appearance Manager to draw widgets just like Carbon and Cocoa do. The code is fully open source and in qt/styles/qmacintoshstyle.[cpp/h].

Now, there are a few bugs with the current implementation, especially in panther, but they will be fixed. Many of similar off-by-one bugs existed in early versions of Carbon on OSX, especially before MacOSX 10.1.5.

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Re: Except that Qt isn't native on the Mac
by Justin Karneges on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @14:11

The main problem is that the Mac has a much more advanced GUI system then you'd find on any other platform, thus making emulation very difficult. I wonder if Trolltech should try a wrapper-based approach to Qt/Mac. This is already done with QMenuBar, and it probably could be done to the rest of the widgets as well. I believe this is how Java on the Mac works as well. wxWidgets definitely works this way.

Of course, this might mean losing very obscure functionality, like painting arbitrarily on a QPushButton, but for 99% of the use cases, the benefits of wrapping the native widgets would outweigh this loss. Maybe Qt could fall back to an emulated widget if someone performs such an obscure operation. If I wasn't so busy I might actually try implementing this, as it sounds like a lot of fun (if a lot of work).

In addition to this, the Mac supports advanced widgets, like the preferences dialog stuff. It would be nice if there were a way to take advantage of these widgets in a Qt/Mac app. Years ago, this kind of widget reuse just wasn't seen, but nowadays with KDE and Mac, there are lots of advanced widgets available, and "plain Qt" apps definitely stick out by not using them. We're entering the next generation of desktops, and being a native app is more than just using primitive widgets these days. Trolltech's got some work ahead.

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Re: Except that Qt isn't native on the Mac
by Olaf Jan Schmidt on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @14:43

> I wonder if Trolltech should try a wrapper-based approach to Qt/Mac. This is already done with QMenuBar, and it probably could be done to the rest of the widgets as well.

This is exactly would Trolltech did with Mac-Qt 3.3.

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