In this third and final installment on introductory Qt programming, let’s take a look at two graphical development tools that are part of the Qt framework: the GUI editor Qt Designer and the foreign language translation tool Qt Linguist.
In this third and final installment on introductory Qt programming, let’s take a look at two graphical development tools that are part of the Qt framework: the GUI editor Qt Designer and the foreign language translation tool Qt Linguist.
Visual GUI Design Using Qt Designer
Qt Designer, shown in Figure One, is a visual graphical user interface editor, meaning that it allows you to design dialog boxes, wizards, and other interface elements in a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) fashion. It opens up to the standard two-panel view, familiar from most integrated development environments (IDEs), with three browser windows on the left-hand side and a workspace on the right. The three browsers show (from top to bottom) the file hierarchy, the parent/child containment hierarchy of widgets, and finally the properties of the currently active widget.
FIGURE ONE: Qt Designer, a visual graphical user interface builder
Besides all of the standard widgets, Qt’s layout managers are also available in the top toolbar. Layout managers provide functionality for the spatial arrangement of widgets, including proper relative positioning and resizing behavior.
Furthermore, the designer provides facilities to handle signal/slot management graphically. Selecting the red and blue “connection tool” in the toolbar and dragging from one widget to another opens the “Edit connections” dialog, also shown in Figure One. In the…
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