Desktop and Mobile are in the DNA of Qt
March 17, 2022 by Tapio Haantie | Comments
Qt has a long and exciting history. Born in Norway, raised in Finland by two different parents, and finally grew up to be a global citizen. Our growth journey includes ups and downs, which have made us pivot and refocus along the way. In the beginning, the focus was on the desktop while Qt 2 brought Embedded into the limelight. Qt 4 was the first actual cross-platform framework, and Qt 5 initially focused on Mobile. After listing to Helsinki Stock markets, we have been growing independently and towards being truly the cross-platform framework that our founders envisioned from the start.
Desktop and Mobile have always been in our core's very essence
Even when Embedded device development has grown to be our largest customer segment, Desktop and Mobile have always been in our core's very essence. One of our main themes for the ongoing strategy period is strengthening the Desktop and Mobile offering even further. Strengthening means investments, including new, dedicated developers, and an overall emphasis on helping our desktop and mobile customers. In 2022, we will spend almost 25% of our R&D investments in Desktop and Mobile related features. Thus being one of the biggest development efforts in any of the Qt business lines in 2022.
Strengthening our Desktop and Mobile offering really took off during 2021. We separated Desktop and Mobile as its own business line to get enough attention for its unique needs. In 2021 we released support for Windows 11, macOS 11, Android 11, and iOS 13 targets. We fixed 622 Desktop and Mobile related bugs and released proper 3D particle system support and continuous support for Qt Widget-based desktop applications. We ensured a working development environment across an extensive array of platforms, released mesh morphing animations and instanced rendering as well as WebAssembly and multimedia in Qt 6. To mention a few topics on top of all the generic enhancements, we have done.
On top of the direct product investments, we are investing in our community. We have hired a new Community Manager to organize and manage our Community efforts. We have also hired a new Learning Manager to lift our eLearning to a whole new level. These are just the first steps to start showing the love that our community deserves and expects.
Qt is and will be a future-proof, truly cross-platform framework
All that being said, we continue investing in the Desktop and Mobile area to keep our offering compelling now and in the future. We'll bring new features, support the latest Desktop and Mobile target platforms, provide both native and branded look-and-feel and provide the long-term support for our stable APIs. Our customers can rely on to get the same support that they have used to with Qt offerings. Qt is and will be a future-proof, truly cross-platform framework.
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Sounds nice. But in reality, Qt Quick is not suitable for serious desktop tasks due to the lack of full-fledged components for working with tables and trees. Qt Widgets hasn't been developed much in many years. Only minor improvements and bug fixes.
Within KDE we built a few very complex QtQuick app outside of Plasma Desktop itself. Two of them are Kalendar and NeoChat where I'm personally involved and botha desktop and mobile application. Kalendar has a very desktop-ish mode with tree views (using kirigami-addons treeview implementation), a menu bar with configurable shortcuts, command launcher, resizable sidebars and many complex views for the month and week view. https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ When developing the apps we encountered a few issues:
lack of real dialogs opening in a new window => we ended up developing out own by creating a new ApplicationWindow
kxmlgui (a qtwidets framework) didn't integrate well since it uses Q{Gui}Action instead of the qtquick controls 2 private api QQuickAction. We wrote wrappers but it would be very nice to merge the two so that ugly wrappees are not needed anymore.
Lack of a Tree view for the task view in QQC2 -> we ended up using the kde implementation that internally transform a tree view in a list view with some additional role for the nesting information. Looks pretty nice but i'm looking forward qt6 tree view implementation. Hopefully it handles keyboard navigation and Right to Left layout out of the box
many other issues like right click event handling for text areas or consistent styling with QtWidgets apps are already solved by qqc2-desktop-style and Kirigami: https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/html/ and https://api.kde.org/frameworks/qqc2-desktop-style/html/
... and the lack of right mouse click support for many built in Qt Quick controls - WTF?
Qt on Linux desktop has been shipping for years without any integration with GNOME, it does not even pick the system color palette. At the very least, picking system colors and shipping a modern style (i.e. not Fusion) will fix the terrible user experience.
One point which speaks against Qt when discussing SDKs with our customers is the user interface. The Material theme is heavily outdated, there is no iOS style, and the widgets style is outdated too. I hope that the work mentioned in the 2022 roadmap will improve this.
This sounds good. Qt has a tremendous unexploited potential in the mobile sector, same could be true for webassembly as well.
Good Lord give us a break with all that marketing non sense! Nobody gives a fuck about your 3D particles or mesh morphing on the desktop! A decade (!) of neglect is hardly caught up in 2022. Qt Widgets is kept alive with an absolute minimum of effort, outdated and without any support of anything you'd expect from an up to date widget system (want to write some qss files for me?). Quick Controls 1 was a start (although a CPU-hungry one) but ditched for Controls 2 that never even came close in (desktop) functionality. In Controls 2, you have to write even the most trivial desktop stuff again and again (mouse wheel handlers in SpinBoxes seems to be too much to ask). Mobile platforms were THE THING in your marketing in 2015ish and quickly abandoned when you focused on embedded, leaving your (and then mine) customers with half baked solutions, odd behaving Uis and, in the end, a recommendation to buy Felgo licenses on top for even more money to fix the promises you never kept. Yes, your rip off licenses are totally worth 3k a year. This is so pathetic.
Setting the wheelEnabled property to true does this. For any other problems you're having with Controls, please report them so that we can address them.
Qt is hiring, so we can hope that the situation can be improved, if what you describe is true.
Qt company just reminds me of Nokia, once popular but not anymore, maybe the stock price makes them so full of arrogance.