At this point, it’s all just musings of a warped mind…
Truth be told, I’d prefer to just stick with wxWidgets. It really does make the Windows/Linux UI transparent to my endeavors. If it only did high-bitdepth displays… (and there might be a way, I just haven’t dug into it yet.)
Qt stuck out for its apparent multi-platform support. I’ve tried to do “stupid pet tricks” with wxWidgets to support touchscreens, but it just doesn’t work nice.
Another key consideration is my customer base. Me. That’s it, to my knowledge; if others are actually using rawproc, I don’t specifically know it. The 8-bit monitor I’m staring at now will probably be the one I take to the nursing home, and I much prefer a mouse to work with image manipulation softwares, so my current environment well-suits the “customer base”…
The node-based softwares are interesting, but I haven’t dug into their specifics to pass judgement on their efficacy for single-image processing. It does seem a waste of screen real estate to depict a processing graph, when my inclination is to a layer paradigm. rawproc is a more rudimentary implementation of a layer paradigm than PhotoFlow; I had the command-line string of operators presented by G’MIC in mind when I cobbled together the first iterations. Indeed, unless I find out something compelling about nodes and graphs, rawproc-next will have a tree-based layer organization for image operations, just as it has now.
Thanks for asking; really, these musings were just wafting through my noggin, and you’ve given me the opportunity to make complete sentences out of them for consideration…
I’ve tried to do “stupid pet tricks” with wxWidgets to support touchscreens, but it just doesn’t work nice.
Well, I am not a programmer but I am confident you will be pleased to try the Qt Quick Toolkit (the same of Filmulator) which is strongly oriented towards touch screen devices.
The 8-bit monitor I’m staring at now will probably be the one I take to the nursing home
This joke made me laugh
Since you are planning your change well ahead you might also consider to aim to the Qt 6 release:
It goes without saying, but there is no need to change if you are fine with the wxWidgets. However, trying new things keeps your brain alive and kicking…
Indeed, indeed! In that regard, this past weekend my neighbor introduced me to a volunteer opportunity at a ‘model railroad museum’, where they operate trains prototypically using a realistically-behaving signalling system. I thought I knew how those things worked, but dealing with it in ‘real-time’ taxed bear-of-little-brain here… but my wife still does not see how such brain exercise will help me remember our anniversary…
Indeed, I plan to do that at some point, for three main reasons:
I hate GTK3, so I will probably invest time in the Qt migration as soon as I will need to abandon GTK2
I have the hope that Qt does not suffer from the color management limitations of Cairo under MacOS. However, the answer to this still requires some research…
I’d like to port the application to Android, particularly once a Vulkan-based pipeline will be integrated. Then Qt seems the way to go…
I hate GTK3, so I will probably invest time in the Qt migration as soon as I will need to abandon GTK2.
Your opinion does not surprise me even though I am not a programmer by trade and I am completely unable to judge the question properly…
“I’m beginning to think GTK exists only to make Qt shine” was a similar opinion expressed by Aurélien Pierre in another topic of this forum (“New Interface in darktable 2.7 - dev” on May 22 - 2019).
For my fumbling attempts with Python I have chosen the Qt toolkit for the GUIs because It is superbly documented (books, tutorials etc).
On Linux I have always preferred the KDE desktop (Kubuntu and the like) and therefore I am totally biased as regards my personal preferences…
Maybe the upcoming GTK 4 version will improve things for the better
I have the hope that Qt does not suffer from the color management limitations of Cairo under MacOS.
As regards this topic I am pretty sure you can gather some information from the Krita folks [1].
From what I have read in their forums they are “less than pleased” about the Apple attitude of “forcing” the open source developers to adopt their own proprietary toolkits (Metal etc). But really I do NOT want to start an additional flame about this
