5 ms·

> All with the same binary installers. So you integrate with the user's desktop environment, using standard local widgets, theming, integration with UX guideli

by pbsdp 13y ago

> All with the same binary installers. So you integrate with the user's desktop environment, using standard local widgets, theming, integration with UX guidelines, local library dependencies, etc? Or are you shipping a Qt app with your own dependencies included? If so, Qt is pretty notoriously buggy on OS X (and rightfully disliked by most users as it stands outside all platform conventions), perhaps explaining some of your complaints.

berkut 13y ago
Local widgets & theming yes, although generally we ship with our own themes by default as we make VFX apps, and the last thing artists want is bright UI to distract them. I don't believe there are general UX guidelines for Linuxes, but for things like notification popups, system tray stuff, yeah, we do all that natively to the distro through Qt (DBus handles all that transparently within Qt very nicely). We ship Qt as shared libs with the binaries and all dependencies we need system-wise statically - i.e. zlib, libpng, libjpeg are statically linked. For things like embedded Python, we have to do the same on OS X anyway, due to different python and zlib versions per OS X version. As for Qt and OS X regarding nativeness - I keep hearing this, but I never see any good examples. I agree it's possible to create Qt Apps on OS X that looks crap, but it's also possible to make them look native as far as I'm concerned. The only thing I can remember not being able to easily do in Qt regarding OS X widgets is the horizontal grouping of side-by-side buttons in radio-button fashion. But it's easy enough to knock up a QWidget subclass which replicates this. But admittedly I don't think I've tried to replicate every possible OS X control/widget... I think what might be the most difficult part of making a Qt app on OS X look native is the layout and spacing stuff, which generally does seem to be a bit crap within Qt on OS X. I can have the same code to do a side-panel with edit values in a panel, and it looks great on Linux and Windows: http://imgur.com/kUI90ry http://imgur.com/kUI90ry on OS X: http://imgur.com/yqigBdw http://imgur.com/yqigBdw and the spacing and padding is all over the place - so I have to add a manual style-sheet to get the padding and spacing right, which is crap (image above is without extra stylesheet). So I'm not saying it's perfect or easy, but I think it is possible.
- omershapira 13y ago
  Do you work for the Foundry? I find that Nuke for OSX is by far the crashiest. Was wondering why.
  - berkut 13y ago
    What version (OS X and Nuke) and how does it crash doing what as an example?
    - omershapira 13y ago
      Mostly things that smelled like memory leaks (pull a matte, leave it for a while, come back and tweak it => long coffee break). Also, restoring from idle seemed to be the hardest on Snow Leopard.
      - berkut 13y ago
        Which keyer? Primatte's had a few issues in 6.3 and previous. on 10.6 (and 10.7), memory allocation/paging is pretty atrocious if you haven't got much free mem left. Basically, OS X prioritises paging to disk over freeing up Inactive memory (which isn't actually being used for anything at present), which is pretty crap. So it's very easy to make it page when it shouldn't when you allocate loads of memory, and the system will generally just grind to a halt. Apple fixed this in 10.8, so now it will free up Inactive memory first, before it starts paging. But neither of these explain any crashes within Nuke.
        omershapira 13y ago
        Indeed Primatte. This explains a lot. Thanks!
- jstsch 13y ago
  The dialog you've shown for OS X does not look native at all. Not just the spacing, but especially the second selector ('render') is quite odd. Also the font usage for the labels, the light-gray borders around the input fields and the tab focus is strange. Does QT basically render a bitmap, or does it use the native controls and just has some odd default styling? If it's the first, then I would probably do the UI in native Objective C/Cocoa and keep a nice cross platform base for the VFX core of the app. Not sure if that's feasible for your application of course.

by pbsdp 13y ago

berkut 13y ago

Local widgets & theming yes, although generally we ship with our own themes by default as we make VFX apps, and the last thing artists want is bright UI to distract them. I don't believe there are general UX guidelines for Linuxes, but for things like notification popups, system tray stuff, yeah, we do all that natively to the distro through Qt (DBus handles all that transparently within Qt very nicely). We ship Qt as shared libs with the binaries and all dependencies we need system-wise statically - i.e. zlib, libpng, libjpeg are statically linked. For things like embedded Python, we have to do the same on OS X anyway, due to different python and zlib versions per OS X version. As for Qt and OS X regarding nativeness - I keep hearing this, but I never see any good examples. I agree it's possible to create Qt Apps on OS X that looks crap, but it's also possible to make them look native as far as I'm concerned. The only thing I can remember not being able to easily do in Qt regarding OS X widgets is the horizontal grouping of side-by-side buttons in radio-button fashion. But it's easy enough to knock up a QWidget subclass which replicates this. But admittedly I don't think I've tried to replicate every possible OS X control/widget... I think what might be the most difficult part of making a Qt app on OS X look native is the layout and spacing stuff, which generally does seem to be a bit crap within Qt on OS X. I can have the same code to do a side-panel with edit values in a panel, and it looks great on Linux and Windows: http://imgur.com/kUI90ry http://imgur.com/kUI90ry on OS X: http://imgur.com/yqigBdw http://imgur.com/yqigBdw and the spacing and padding is all over the place - so I have to add a manual style-sheet to get the padding and spacing right, which is crap (image above is without extra stylesheet). So I'm not saying it's perfect or easy, but I think it is possible.

omershapira 13y ago
Do you work for the Foundry? I find that Nuke for OSX is by far the crashiest. Was wondering why.
- berkut 13y ago
  What version (OS X and Nuke) and how does it crash doing what as an example?
  - omershapira 13y ago
    Mostly things that smelled like memory leaks (pull a matte, leave it for a while, come back and tweak it => long coffee break). Also, restoring from idle seemed to be the hardest on Snow Leopard.
    - berkut 13y ago
      Which keyer? Primatte's had a few issues in 6.3 and previous. on 10.6 (and 10.7), memory allocation/paging is pretty atrocious if you haven't got much free mem left. Basically, OS X prioritises paging to disk over freeing up Inactive memory (which isn't actually being used for anything at present), which is pretty crap. So it's very easy to make it page when it shouldn't when you allocate loads of memory, and the system will generally just grind to a halt. Apple fixed this in 10.8, so now it will free up Inactive memory first, before it starts paging. But neither of these explain any crashes within Nuke.
      - omershapira 13y ago
        Indeed Primatte. This explains a lot. Thanks!
jstsch 13y ago
The dialog you've shown for OS X does not look native at all. Not just the spacing, but especially the second selector ('render') is quite odd. Also the font usage for the labels, the light-gray borders around the input fields and the tab focus is strange. Does QT basically render a bitmap, or does it use the native controls and just has some odd default styling? If it's the first, then I would probably do the UI in native Objective C/Cocoa and keep a nice cross platform base for the VFX core of the app. Not sure if that's feasible for your application of course.