赖洪礼的 blog

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I’ve had pretty bad experiences with wxWidgets. Not that the toolkit itself is bad, but it’s lacking functionality and polish in various unexpected and awkward ways. The biggest turn-off for me is that it doesn’t support buttons with icons. Not only do I want my GUI apps to work well, I also want them to look nice and to integrate well into the environment. On Linux/GNOME, having buttons with icons is almost essential – not having icons just makes the GUI look plain and ugly. On Windows it can make a big difference as well when it comes to UI aesthetics. The wxWidgets developers commented that they won’t implement this because not all platforms (e.g. Windows) support it. I personally think this is nonsense – Delphi has supported buttons with icons since version 1.0 (for Windows 3.1). Besides, why not just implement it on platforms that do support it, and document it as such? This is already the case for things such as the flat button style.

Another thing I don’t like about wxWidgets is how it forces one to build the GUI top-down. One must first construct a parent container before one can construct child widgets. It’s not possible to construct an invisible child widget and then later on attach that onto a parent. This seems to be a design decision influenced by limitations in Windows.
wxWidgets also has the tendency to layout the GUI differently on different platforms. I usually develop wxWidgets applications on Linux, and port them to Windows later on. What usually happens is that the GUI looks fine on Linux, but totally breaks on Windows – buttons being laid out differently, controls that have the wrong size, etc. I usually end up having to fix the GUI code for Windows. Apparently wxWidgets has different layout implementations for different platforms, and they behave subtly different ways.

The list can go on and on. But generally, wxWidgets feels clunky and awkward except for simple and standard user interfaces without a lot of dynamics. The differences in layout and resize behavior on different platforms seem to be bigger than the differences in CSS implementations in different browsers (with the exception of IE of course).

Qt 4 seems to be a good cross-platform GUI toolkit and doesn’t suffer from these issues. It looks very nice on Linux. However, I’ve seen Mac people flaming Qt for looking “totally miserable” on OS X. I couldn’t find any screenshots of Qt 4 on OS X so I can’t confirm whether that’s true. Does anybody have experience with Qt on OS X, and can show me some screenshots?

Linux has supported antialiased fonts for quite some years now, but the default (antialiased) terminal fonts have always bothered me. By default, GNOME Terminal 2.x uses an antialiased Monospace or Fixed font:

I antialiasing makes terminals looks ugly. I much prefer the font as used by xterm, or GNOME Terminal 1.x. Back when Linux didn’t have good support for antialiased fonts, GNOME Terminal 1.x used a non-antialiased (bitmap) version of the Fixed font.

Luckily, I can use bitmap fonts in all fontconfig-enabled applications (which automatically includes all GTK and Qt applications). Although the “Fixed” font is antialiased now, the “MiscFixed” font is not – in fact it’s exactly the same as the old non-antialiased “Fixed” font. After using the MiscFixed font, by terminal now looks like this:

Not only does this look nicer, it also makes GNOME Terminal faster.

It’s quite a hassle to find this font. I don’t remember where I got this font from. So for my convenience, as well as for the convenience of the reader, I have attached the font to this blog post:
MiscFixed font – download here
Extract the contents to ~/.fonts, restart your terminal, and select “MiscFixed” as font in your terminal.

About two months ago I switched from Fedora 4 to Ubuntu 6.10. My scanner, an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo, worked fine on Fedora 4. Today I tried to scan something and I found out that it wouldn’t work on Ubuntu for some reason. usb-find-scanner could find my scanner just fine. scanimage -L also lists my scanner. But whenever I start xsane, I get the message

open of device snapscan:libusb:002:007 failed: Invalid argument

I already installed Epson Kowa’s iscan driver from source and it still wouldn’t work.

After some searching I found this site. I followed the instructions: I downloaded the iscan RPMs and converted them to DEB with alien. After installing the DEBs the scanner works! I had to remove libsane-extras though. That conflicts with the generated DEB files.

[EDIT] I also had to edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, and add ‘epkowa’ as entry.