KDialogBase

[Bernd Gehrmann]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Ralf Nolden wrote:

> Roland Krause wrote:
> > 
> > While trolling through the code yesterday I noticed that almost all the
> > dialogs were coded by hand.
> > 
> > Is it possible to rebuild some of these using Qt's designer?
> > 
> > Especially, is it possible to build dialogs that are based on
> > KDialogBase using Qt designer.
> 
> For 2.0 that doesn't make much sense as this will definetly be the last
> version. For 3.0, I already talked to bernd that the general rule is to
> design the dialogs with designer so developers who can't do layout
> management by hand can still touch the dialogs. I'll add a section to
> the hacking file to stick with this rule; the current dialogs will have
> to be remade with designer in 3.0 so that we have all GUI stuff done
> with it.

Well, actually this is only half of the truth.

Qt designer is a tool. You can use a tool in a way that makes sense,
and you can misuse a tool. You can use a hammer to put a nail into
the wall, but you can also use it to beat your thumb green and blue.

Unfortunately, designer is heavily misused in KDE. Many dialogs made
with it are completely unusable. They lack accelerators, they don't
have buddies set, they don't set initial focus, they don't set minimal
widths in a font-independent way, they have nested group boxes or
group boxes that group nothing, or are in other ways unusable without
a mouse.

It's nice if we have dialogs properly designed with a dialog
editor. But we should certainly not encourage people to replace
dialogs that work and are usable with stuff that sucks with
the argument that designer is cool.

Bernd.


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