Kirigami: a feature needed for subsurface and api change feedback

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 12:17:14PM +0200, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 April 2016 09:41:15 Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> > We set the font size based on preferences, IIRC - and we use the same
> > prefs for desktop and mobile (that's not just laziness - that allows me to
> > set up the proxy with the desktop version and then have the mobile version
> > built on the same system use those settings).
> 
> Are you sure? I think I patched that out in order to fix most high dpi issues.

Err, no. I'm trying to understand why things aren't going the way they
should. That why I wrote this:

> > Could that be what causes the problem?

Anyway, the scaling issues on ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, uhdpi screens are within
acceptable margins as far as I'm concerned.

But at this point there are three fundamental frustrations building a
mobile app with Qt 5.6 / QML / Kirigami - and it seems more and more that
these are all fundamentally Qt/QML issues:

(1) the keyboard issue on both iOS and (maybe less so) Android.
    Sometimes the virtual keyboard opening is deteceted correctly and
    correct bottom margin is added, sometimes it isn't. So either we
    compensate for the bug in Kirigami (as we do today) and then get the
    HUGE gray empty area above the virtual keyboard when Qt does detect
    the keyboard being there, or we don't, and then the keyboard hides the
    lower part of the page and you can't scroll that up, either.

(2) the inferior text input fields.
    Both on iOS and Android the TextField does not act the same way as a
    native text input field does. The copy/cut/paste/positioning(loupe)
    functionality that the user expects from an app on that platform
    simply  aren't there. Trying to follow the argument in the Qt bugs
    that have been filed on this gives you ulcers.

(3) the ListView scrolling issue
    When scrolling a ListView it's very easy to get into a state where QML
    gets confused and part or all of the screen becomes background color
    and trying to scroll makes things jump around erratically. This seems
    to happen at the bottom of longer lists and usually is triggered by
    scrolling faster.

All three of these make a Qt/QML/Kirigami based apps seem painfully buggy
compared to native apps. And I have no idea how to address any of them, or
even how to get serious attention from the right developers on this. iOS
and Android clearly are treated as "afterthought" and "gimmick" by a large
part of the Qt developers (but not by the Kirigami developers, of course).

I will keep hacking around and will continue to try to create a solid
mobile app, but I feel that unless we manage to get these issues
addressed, it's unlikely that Kirigami can become a serious, successful
platform for mobile apps.

If you would like to know about any of these issues or think you have a
solution for one or more of them, please talk to me :-)

/D