Re: QtDesigner/Glade

[Helge Hess]

Richard Dale wrote:
> I think the Qt Designer format is too specific to the Qt toolkit to use as a
> AppKit format. For instance, here is a sample extract:
> 
>         <widget class="QPushButton" row="3" column="2">
...
>             <property name="enabled">
>                 <bool>false</bool>
...
> It has the name of a Qt widget 'QPushButton', and expects it to have
> properties compatible with other Qt widgets.

Why can't we map that to an NSButton ? I would expect that the
functionality of Qt and AppKit is pretty much the same.

The only tricky thing is the box system, but even this should be pretty
similiar between Qt, Gtk+ and GS-Appkit for most stuff ?

> On the other hand, it would be possible to generate Objective-C/Qt code via
> the Qt Designer uic utility for the KDE Qt/Objective-C bindings project,
...

Well, I'm not so interested in using Qt ObjC (only a bit ;-). I would
love to have a common XML based format for generating UI for any of Qt,
gtk+, AppKit, Aqua, ... - like XUL. Of course choosing an XML format
which already has UI builder support is best ;-)

> The .ui file format isn't language independent as it can contain embedded
> snippets of code (always C++ at the moment), which makes it specific to
> whichever language you were using with Qt Designer. 

Who forces me to use the code features ? If I use Qt Designer just for
layout, I would expect that the .ui file doesn't contain code. Even if
it does contain C++, we might soon have ObjC++ in gcc 4.x ;-), so this
could be a cool feature in any case.

> And it assumes widgets
> are connected via the Qt slots/signals mechanism, rather than outlets/actions.

Yes, this would need to be mapped too, but I'm pretty sure it is
wouldn't be too complicated, as the concept is always the same (UI sends
some message to some object ;-)

Greetings
  Helge
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