QtCS2018 QtWidgets

State of the Union

QtCo took over maintainership from KDAB

• Jan Arve: layouts
• Gabriel: style
• Eskil: text
• Andreas: graphics view
• Richard: overall
• still unassigned: stylesheets, windows and dialogs

JIRA

• currently no P0 bugs
• 60 P1 bugs, 24 have no assignees
• 781 P2 bugs, 273 have no assignees
• < 1000 P3, 311 with no assignee
• 311: P4-P5
• Total: more than 1800 bugs
  

Probably many duplicates, many corner cases

• During the last year: ~500 patches, ~200 bugs fixed
• 43 non-bug Tasks, mostly assigned

So, lots of bugs to work on, that's the focus now.

• Not enough manpower, we need help from the community
• Fixing bugs tends to create more (especially with dock widget or mdi)

Possible new features

We have a green light, everybody knows it's important to customers, but not enough manpower. Also,
not a lot of good ideas lately. Should we continue fixing bugs mainly, and/or start adding more features; if so, what?

• Ribbon? but MS has patents and had a lawsuit threat; but ribbons are appearing in their products on non-Windows platforms anyway, and on OpenOffice etc.
  • Check QTitanRibbon. IIRC you can license the Ribbon IP from Microsoft, for free, for any use BUT Office suites (text processors, presentation software, datasheets, etc).
• Charting features, but they are kindof independent
• Notifications (beyond QSystemTrayIcon)
• Hamburger menu
• Putting stuff into the titlebar
• Selector buttons
• Segmented buttons
• Switches
• Anything else that Pencil or Balsamiq has, that we don't have
• Client-side window decorations
• Finger hit detection, smarter than taking the middle of the touchpoint somehow
• Text selection

New styling system for Qt 6

QStyle: should we revisit it for Qt 6?

• only worthwhile if we can have something shared between widgets and controls
• dependency only on QtGui
• idea: use QtQuick for styling?
• customers like widgets with quirks... sometimes by subclassing, sometimes by custom styles
  • no template pattern for QStyleOption, e.g. for QLineEdit, QComboBox - you need to redo too much work to customize it
• idea: physics and lighting
• more generalized QPalette
  • KDE has a bigger one
  • or, unify the style and the palette
• image-based style for widgets?
• mobile styles, e.g. Android
• ship fancier cross-platform styles like Controls 2 has

More ideas & discussion points

• Portability of widget apps to mobile?
• Use the scene graph?
  • But why take the risk... just make QtQuick better, have native styles in Controls etc.
  • If QtQuick C++ APIs are familiar enough, it might help people to switch
• embedding QtQuick in native or widget-based applications
• per-platform UIs, just as you can already do in QML
• native UIs with Qt backend is sometimes worthwhile, c.f. Microsoft OneDrive
• mobile often comes first nowadays
• "100% native looking" (whatever that means)
• have to respect all native conventions like right click time and reverse scrolling regardless of style
• Widgets ain't broke so don't fix it too much.
• We will keep supporting widgets for the foreseeable future
• QML might never replace widgets (that was Nokia thinking)