Elegant Qt's future?

[jacek]

I was impressed to see a step back w.r.t. designer moving from Qt3 to Qt4 (although I must admit, I was never a Qt3 programmer).

On the contrary, the way that .ui files are handled in Qt4 is far more flexible than it was in Qt3, where you were forced to derive your class from QWidget, QDialog or QMainWindow. Now you can derive your forms from your own classes and still use .ui files.

The Trolls have dropped the possibility to use .ui.h files and removed the code editor from Qt Designer, but that was really a dead end --- I can't imagine using them for some serious work.

Will this trend toward simplicity [not sure if this is the right word] continue, as I hope it does, and what factors are involved?

I'm not sure if Qt can be simplier, although the Interview framework is a bit too complex for beginners and they tend to use QxxxWidgets instead of QxxxView, which in the end is just a waste of time. But that's not a matter of changing the API, but rather a documentation issue.

Certainly Qt will be more powerful in the future, just look at TT labs site and see what they're working on. They're not focusing on simply adding new modules to Qt, but rather adding more power to existing mechanisms.