[sldev] New Viewer Shell Proposal
Alissa Sabre
alissa_sabre at yahoo.co.jp
Tue Aug 21 19:34:01 PDT 2007
> 2. Use Qt instead of your own system. Will look a lot closer to native,
> and those people work full time on this stuff, so it'll be more
> polished.
More polished than what?
It can't be more polished than Windows native UI, since in Microsoft,
there are thousands of full-time employee are woking on it, and Qt
can't have more engineers than that. (If you count *skills*, Qt
could... just joking. :-)
Seriously, I don't understand why you want Qt. SL viewer doesn't use
so-called UI compatibility layer. It interracts through OS's native
APIs. Qt (or any other compatibility layers) can't be better than
direct use of native APIs. (Ah, except for Linux; it uses GTK for
framing and SDL for surface grabbing and input events on Linux (and
only on Linux.))
On the other hand, I don't prefer Qt because of the following
I18N-unfriendly features: (My experiences on Qt is limited and may be
outdated, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Actually, I even didn't
know Qt can coexist with OpenGL!)
* Qt has its own _translation_framework_. It sounds good, but it
assumes that an English sentence (or just a short label) is always
translates to one same stentence in all languages, and it is wrong.
(See discussions in
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2007-July/003714.html
and related messages for this point.) Because it has its own
mechanism built in, replacing it with other method is not easy.
* Qt sticks on the two-byte Unicode. It doesn't support surrogate
pairs. The developers say its intentional, because they believe
nobody needs more than two bytes.
* Qt's input method interface is heavily biased with X11/Linux manner.
It works on Windows and MacOS, but its based on the simulation of
the X11-style interface on top of Windows/MacOS native APIs, and we
can only use minimum input method features on non-Linux.
(This point can be considered as a trade-off, not a problem, since
at this moment, SL viewer uses SDL on Linux, and SDL provides
*less*than*minimum* support for input methods. As a result, SL
viewer has no possibility to provide reasonable input method support
as long as it uses SDL. Switching to Qt will be a good news for
Chinese/Japanese/Korean-speaking residents on Linux...)
Bottom line: I don't like any framework that is not friendly to
non-English speakers. SL viewer is poor on handling non-English at
this moment, but it has possibilities in a future because it does all
by itself. If we choose poor framework, we would be bound with it.
Hope this help constructive discussion.
Alissa Sabre
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