QGraphicsView to the rescue?
Nobody will be surprised to learn that I am rather inordinately fond of Qt. Two things happened today to reinforce that prejudice: I had my first encounter with Borland VCL code for a decade, and I demonstrated the 40.000 chips demo to my new colleagues.
Borland VCL is truly a time machine. A return to the nineties. I have no doubt that it offers many possibilities and that it is quite easy to whip up an acceptable gui. But if Trolltech gets flak for adding SIGNAL and SLOT -- how much more flak does Borland deserve for __fast_call and related things?
One requirement OmniTrans has for a more modern development toolkit is that we need to have many tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of graphical elements in a single model, including text, vector and raster, and we need to be able to print such a model to an A0 plotter without killing the beast. The Forty-thousand chips model shows that QGraphicsView can perform quite well with a lot of elements (although rotating is a tiny bit slow with all the elements visible at the same time...). Now I only have to hack the demo print routine to print all the elements to A0, scaled so they fit perfectly, at maximum printer resolution. But I trust in Qt! (The elements, btw, should be animated while on screen, anti-aliased, composited with an alpha channel and perfectly aligned.)
And in other news -- I'm installing KDE 4 beta2 on Rebecca's old laptop, a Gateway Solo with 280 mb of memory and a 500 Mhz celeron. This is going to be the first KDE 4-only machine in our house!