Have a look at this figure below, which is a Quick Book Enterprise Solution 2014
Judging by its interface (not its DLL), I don't think you can easily guess with what platform/language does the above application was created. Qt? .NET? Java? It has its own border, custom menu, ... etc. In a simple wording, "it has totally customized UI that make it stand from the rest".
What do we need to be able to create this kind of application with fully customized UI? And what if I add cross platform aspect in this application? Different customized widgets in different OSes... but maintaining the same level of UI appearance...
I have previous experience with Qt, .. but I am not sure Qt can do this.. or is it?
For instance, you can write your own plugin similar to the existing qt style plugins.
Here, you can find an example how to write widget based style plugins with Qt 5:
QtWidgets 5.0: Style Plugin Example
You would work with the QStylePlugin plugin interface.
If you are looking into a bit more modern solution, you may find this qml style and theme support documentation useful.
I am wondering which way is the best to start building a GUI+SOFT in Qt. I am trying to build a sound media player based on a MVC pattern. Until now i have found 3 ways to do so.
1- Should I use a .ui file thanks to Qt designer, is it flexible enough ?
2- Should I use QML to make the design than integrate it to a C++ development ?
3- Should I just start from scratch and do it by hand without Qt Designer and using Qt library ?
Thank you very much for your answers.
NOTE: I'm using PyQt, so my comment may not be the most relevant.
I found Qt Designer to be great to create UIs, but then, when comes the time to modify them later, it becomes somewhat of a problem. Inserting new elements in an existing layout is often tricky, and you have to break all your layouts and re-assemble them (hoping you didn't mess anything up). Moreover, if your app is not trivial, you'll likely end up with code "fixing" what the .ui can't do. There are other tricky cases like that, but I don't remember them right now.
I ended up getting rid of my .ui files. So what I'd recommend is to initially use the designer to create the UI, and then use only the generated code from that point forward.
If you want your UI to be animated and it is not a requirement to follow platform UI appearance, QML is by far the best way to achieve this. If you want a UI that appears like any other application on your system and has limited animation then stick with QtDesigner and standard widgets.
I prefer building UI completely from scratch. This gives a lot of flexibility and better understanding of what is where, but on the other hand changing layout sometimes is a big headache.
I would use Qt Designer, as this is the easiest method IMHO.
I'm interested to know if gtkmm w/ ATK (or whatever) works with MSAA like Qt does. We're looking right now at switching toolkit from WX and it turns out that our testing software relies on MSAA to do it's thing (something I wish I'd known 3 years ago when we picked WX to begin with). Of all the GUI toolkits, I prefer GTKmm mainly due to it's use of signals and slots but in a way much more expressive and generic than Qt's....and without the need for the extra build step that requires the Qt VS plugin. The designer is much better too.
So I'd like to use GTKmm but the only discussions and google stuff I can find on the topic are 3+ years old. They lead me to believe the answer is no, it doesn't support it and if it does it's really shoddy. But a lot can change in 3 years.
So, anyone that uses GTK or GTKmm on win32 know if it supports the windows accessibility framework?
I can’t say for sure but I would lean toward very little to no support. I use the Jaws screen reader SOFTWARE SINCE I’m blind. It uses MSAA quite heavily and GTK applications such as Pidgin are almost completely inaccessible. While I can read some of the text on a screen figuring out weather I’m in an edit field or weather a button is selected is impossible. If my screen reader can’t deal with GTK applications I assume your testing software will have major issues as well.
I don't know if this is still being tracked but I will second this assessment as another windows screen reader user. gnuCash was the app I tried and it was pretty rough going. Worked like a dream in Gnome with Orca though. Apparently, it's like this, if you want windows accessibility, use QT and WxWidgets. If you want Linux, use gtk+. QT is going to be accessible in Linux apparently though this is yet to be (not till gnome 3, I think). Pity you had to abandon WxWidgets. I personally like their widgets since it has those sizers which take much of the guess work out of placement of controls. Important when you can't see and you want to build a gui. Looks like about the only cross-platform accessibility solutions right now are Xul and SWT (Java, you know). Sad thing about WxWidgets is that this sort of thing was reported to them two years ago but nothing seems to have been done about it.
http://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/9785
I would be delighted to know that I am wrong about this. I doubt it, though.
What is a cross-platform C++ GUI framework that has good skinning ability?
So I could (and give the users) the ability to customise the GUI.
The Qt framework allows for changing the appearance of widgets using style sheets (using css). See: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtwidgets/stylesheet.html.
EDIT: As you're looking for something like wxSkin, first why not use it in the first place?
Then, if you don't want to use wxSkin, have a look at Juce. Qt's goal is definitely not themeable GUIs although windows masks and stylesheets are a way to implement them. There is the QSkingObject project on Qt-Apps.org but last time I checked it I found that the quality of the code was poor (of course this is subjective and argumentative).
You can have a look at Juce which has a dual license: GPL and commercial.
Qt (LGPL) has stylesheets to style the widgets, but it still let the operating system draw the windows decorations unless you instruct it to draw frameless windows and draw the decorations by yourself.
However, think twice before going the skinned application route. A typical example is Songbird (written in XUL) which used frameless windows and painted its own titlebar and windows buttons. Then they back-pedaled and switch back to system windows decorations after many users complained.
Qt has convenient support for that with Qt style sheets et al. The Qt labs blog had an example post that might give you an idea.
As other say, Qt's stylesheets work well.
You also have the option to customize the drawing in Qt by overriding QStyle. You could allow users to use plugins (exporting a QStyle implementation) to make it super-customizable.
(Then, I don't know if your users are C++ coders or not...)
I've used Juce (compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) in the past and it has a LookAndFeel class (gotta love the name) that allows you to do that.
I'd have to vote for XULRunner because it's extremely skinnable. However, it's not pure C++: application code is written in JavaScript while extensions can be implemented as C++ XPCOM components.
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I'm spending these holidays learning to write Qt applications. I was reading about Qt Designer just a few hours ago, which made me wonder : what do people writing real world applications in Qt use to design their GUIs? In fact, how do people design GUIs in general?
I, for one, found that writing the code by hand was conceptually simpler than using Qt Designer, although for complex GUIs Designer might make sense. Large GUIs might be possible using Designer, but with time they might become very difficult to manage as complexity increases (this is just my opinion). I also downloaded the AmaroK source code to take a peek at what those guys were doing, and found many calls to addWidget() and friends, but none of those XML files created by Designer (aside: AmaroK has to be my favorite application ever on any platform).
What, then, is the "right" way to create a GUI? Designer or code? Let us, for this discussion, consider the following types of GUIs :
Simple dialogs that just need to take input, show some result and exit. Let's assume an application that takes a YouTube URL and downloads the video to the user's hard disk. The sort of applications a newbie is likely to start out with.
Intermediate level GUIs like, say, a sticky notes editor with a few toolbar/menu items. Let's take xPad for example (http://getxpad.com/). I'd say most applications falling in the category of "utilities".
Very complex GUIs, like AmaroK or OpenOffice. You know 'em when you see 'em because they make your eyes bleed.
Our experience with Designer started in Qt3.
Qt3
At that point, Designer was useful mainly to generate code that you would then compile into your application. We started using for that purpose but with all generated code, once you edit it, you can no longer go back and regenerate it without losing your edits. We ended up just taking the generated code and doing everything by hand henceforth.
Qt4
Qt4 has improved on Designer significantly. No longer does it only generate code, but you can dynamically load in your Designer files (in xml) and dynamically connect them to the running objects in your program -- no generated code however, you do have to name the items in Designer and stick with the names to not break your code.
My assessment is that it's nowhere near as useful as Interface Builder on Mac OS X, but at this point, I could see using the Designer files directly in a program.
We haven't moved back to Designer since Qt3, but still use it to prototype, and debug layouts.
For your problems:
You could probably get away with using the standard dialogs that Qt offers.
QInputDialog or if you subclass QDialog, make sure to use QButtonDialogBox
to make sure your buttons have the proper platform-layout.
You could probably do something more limited like xPad with limited Designer functionality.
I wouldn't think you could write something like OpenOffice solely with Designer but maybe that's not the point.
I'd use Designer as another tool, just like your text editor. Once you find the limitations, try a different tool for that new problem. I totally agree with Steve S that one advantage of Designer is that someone else who's not a programmer can do the layout.
In my experience with Qt Designer and other toolkits/UI-tools:
UI tools speed up the work.
UI tools make it easier to tweak the layout later.
UI tools make it easier/possible for non-programmers to work on the UI design.
Complexity can often be dealt with in a UI tool by breaking the design into multiple UI files. Include small logical groups of components in each file and treat each group as a single widget that is used to build the complete UI. Qt Designer's concept of promoted widgets can help with this.
I haven't found that the scale of the project makes any difference. Your experience may vary.
The files created with UI tools (I guess you could write them by hand if you really wanted to) can often be dynamically loaded at run-time (Qt and GTK+ both provide this feature). This means that you can make layout changes and test them without recompiling.
Ultimately, I think both raw code and UI tools can be effective. It probably depends a lot on the environment, the toolkit/UI-tool, and of course personal preference. I like UI tools because they get me up and running fast and allow easy changes later.
The organisation I work for has ported its GUI application to Qt several years ago.
I think there are several aspects that are worth mentioning:
Working with Qt Designer, at least at that point, was not a realistic option: there were too many features that couldn't be done with Qt Designer;
Conventions and structure that had to be preserved prevented the use of Qt Designer;
Once you've started without Designer, it is probably difficult to return to it;
the most important aspect, though, was that the programmers were very much used to programming using vi or emacs, rather than using a GUI IDE.
My own experience, which goes back approx. 4 years, using Qt3.3, is that dynamic behavior in dialogs was not possible to realise in Designer.
Just to say I've written and maintained complex GUIs in Qt without using Qt Designer -- not because I don't like Qt Designer, but because I never got around to working that way.
It's partly a matter of style and where you're coming from: when I started on Qt, I'd had horrible experiences of Dreamweaver and Frontpage and other visual HTML tools,and far preferred writing code with HomeSite and resorting to Photoshop for tricky layout problems.
There's a danger with visual code IDEs that you try to keep within the visual tools, but end up having to tweak code as well -- in ways that aren't well understood.
Learning iPhone development, for example, I've found it frustrating to hit 'magic' visual stuff ('drag from the empty circle in the Connections inspector to the object in the Interface Builder window...') that would be simpler (for me) to understand in plain old code.
Good luck with Qt -- it's a great toolkit, however you use it, and Qt Creator looks like being a great IDE.
I'd add that one of the reasons for using graphical designer was the lack of layout managers in Win32, for instance. Only absolute positioning was possible, and doing that by hand would have just sucked.
Since I switched from Delphi to Java for GUI apps (back in 2002), I've never used designers any more. I like layout managers much more. And yeah, you get boilerplate code, but moving objects on a UI designer may take as much time as changing the boilerplate. Plus, I would be stuck with a slow IDE; that's for the Java/C# case, OK, while for Qt (especially Qt4) it doesn't apply. For Qt3, I wonder why one should edit the generated code - wasn't it possible to add code in other files? For which reason?
About the discussed cases:
1) Hand Coded GUI is likely faster to write, at least if you know your libraries. If you're a newbie and you don't know them, you may save time and learn less with a designer, since you don't need to learn the APIs you use. But "learn less" is the key factor, so in both cases I'd say Hand Coded GUI.
2) Menu bars are quite annoying to write code for. Also, think to details like accelerators and so on. Still, it depends on what you're used to. After some time, it may be faster to type that boilerplate than to point-and-click into designer to fix all those properties, but just if you can really type like into a typewriter (like those admins for which typing Unix commands is faster than using any GUI).
3) I'd extend the answer for case #2 to this one. Note that, for Win32 platforms, it may be possible that using designers which generate Win32 resources might be faster to load (no idea about that).
However, I'd like to mention a potential problem with using Qt Designer there. Real world case: it took some seconds (say 10) to load a complex Java dialog (the Preferences dialog box for a programmer's text editor) with a lot of options. The correct fix would have been to load each of the tabs only when the programmer wanted to see them (I realized that after), by adding a separate method to each preference set to build its GUI.
If you design all the tabs and the tab switcher together with a designer, can you do that as easily? I guess there might be a similar example where a hand coded GUI gives you more flexibility, and in such a big app, you're likely to need that, even if just for optimization purposes.
One of the main benefits of using designer to create GUIs is that other programmers can change or maintain forms and widgets easily without the need to delve in to a complex code.
Its strange that you're saying the writing code is simpler than manipulating objects in a graphical environment. It's a no-brainer.
The designer is there to make your life easier and in the long term it makes your code more maintainable. It's easier looking in the designer to see what the your UI looks like then reading the code and trying to imagine what it might look like.
With current Qt you can do almost everything from within the designer and the very few things you can't do, you can fix with very few lines of code in the constructor.
Take for instance the simplest example - adding a signal-slot connection. Using the designer it's as simple as a double click. Without the designer you need to go lookup the correct signature of the signal, edit the .h file and then edit write your code in the .cpp file. The designer allows you to be above these details and focus on what really matters - the functionality of your application.
I like to first turn to the designer to develop GUI widgets. As mentioned in the other posts, its faster. You also get immediate feedback to see if it "looks right" and isn't confusing to the user. The designer is a major reason I choose Qt over other toolkits.
I mostly use the designer to make the one-off dialogs.
Having said that, I do the main window and any complex widgets by hand.
I think this is the way Trolltech intended. QFormLayout is a class they provide to easily programatically create an input dialog.
By the way, the designer in Qt 4 is not an IDE like the one they had in Qt 3. It's just an editor for editing .ui files. I like it that way. The new cross platform IDE is going to be called Qt Creator.
It's an old post but I would advise you to look at Clementine - a music player which (I think) derives from Amarok. They use Qt4 and from what I can see there is a ui folder in the src folder of the project. In the ui folder as one might expect they have all sorts of .ui files. If you compile and start Clementine you will see that the GUI is fairly complex and quite nice.
For me, it depends how much logic is encapsulated in the widget/GUI. If it's just about simple forms, I prefer to use QtDesigner.
If it contains complex checks or interaction, I tend to program it.
We're using the Qt Designer if anyone needs to create a Gui.
The thing is to create just little Widgets for certain tasks (like you would do in a class-design) and then get them together into a "parent-gui".
This way your widgets are highly reusable and could be used for Guis in a modular way. You just have to specify which signals each Widget is sending and which slots they provide.
We additionally are creating .ui-Files which than could be generated during build-process. Until now there was no need to edit those files by hand.
Build different parts of your UI
in different .ui files using QtDesigner,
then bring them together (and add complications) in code.
There are things you can't do in Qt Designer, you can only do in code,
so Qt Designer is just one (great) part of the tool chain.