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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.
Related
Well, subj.
I use dock widgets in my desktop Qt4 application, but I don't like the layout the docks form. I want the right dock to occupy the upper right corner which is by default occupied by the top dock.
I've googled (seriously!) what can I do with this and I've found an article where the use of QMainWindow::setCorner is described. It is pretty simple, and I've ended up with the following code that I've added to my window's constructor:
this->setCorner(Qt::TopRightCorner,Qt::RightDockWidgetArea);
It works perfectly, but here comes my question.
The code seems to describe the UI in the application's logic code section, which is, I think, not quite good. In my case the UI is described using .ui files I create with Qt Designer, so the UI things are separated from the application's main logic things.
The question is, is there a way to make Qt generate such code from .ui files?
The second reason is that the form in Qt Designer looks different from what I get when I run the application (this behavior is perfectly legal and obvious, of course).
If I'm unclear, please let me know.
Thank you.
Qt generates C++ header file ui_foo.h from foo.ui(XML file format) through UI compiler(uic) during the time qmake is working. In other words, eventually those .ui files will inevitably become part of your logic code, and it's quite normal to interact with those UI instance in code editor.
Personally, I feel Qt Designer's job is helping create a basic body of chiffon and leaving the rest of decoration to logic code, depends on personal appetite so you can add your own flavor and make it a delicious cake. That's why I started to use Qt Creator, which allows me to switch back and forth between the built-in UI designer and code editor. Hence, though I like the way of how Qt Designer simplifies the programming, I'd rather take it just as a supporter.
Let's just say the ability of Qt Deisgner is limited. For example , it's almost impossible to make a table with clickable button only by Qt Designer:
In brief, it is not worthwhile to seek a way to make Qt generate such code from .ui files because it depends on how UI complier is designed. Just code it!
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.
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I've had it of those dozens of editors which never provides simple things like:
distinguish type keywords and instruction keywords so I can put different colors on them.
being cross platform using a standard GUI lib like qt gtk etc (notepad++, yes, I almost hate you).
enough keyboard shortcut like duplicate line, comment selection, and a decent find-replace.
Decent task-easing features like single-click-on-the-number-line-margin to select the entire line.
Scintilla or another good-enough lexer that highlights enough different things, because brain-compiling code is one thing, quickly identify with the eyes what is what is something I find important.
I just want to support very basic languages like C, C++, maybe Python, not HTML or CSS.
Is Scintilla a good choice to just highlight those languages, and is a lexer really necessary ?
Isn't QT enough to program a text editor such as the one I want to do ? I know there is QScintilla, but is there a reason I shouldn't use a lib that integrates a lexer ? Why is Scintilla such a good lib ?
Is QT a good choice for such an editor ? (I also want to hard embed ProFont in the editor to kill any reluctant font problem between OSes).
EDIT:
In short, I want to make an editor, only with the same syntax highlight features of notepad++. That's my main goal, and the use of QScintilla might be a little harder than I thought...
EDIT2:
Well I found textadept, it's not so known but is quite awesome. I didn't manage to make my lexer, since I have other to do which I do under windows, unfortunately it's slow on the mac. Apparently there isn't any Scite official build for the mac.
C++ is not a "very basic language" by any stretch of the imagination.
Why do you really want to do this? There are SOOO many open source code editors out there.
If you must write your own editor, I suggest looking at the other open source editors and examine which pieces you port to your editor.
Porting pieces of existing working and tested code is usually much better than writing your own code and debugging it.
After perusing a couple serious open source editors: Emacs, Eclips, CodeBlocks, CodeLight, etc., I believe you will start changing your mind about writing an editor from scratch.
-- Thomas Matthews
My Info
If you really want to do this (and it sounds like a lot of work) I would look at ANTLR for parsing the code. You may get some ideas from their ANTLRWorks display.
To link the parse tree to a display could be a fair amount of work so I'd see what an IDE platform such as Eclipse has to offer
Are you OK with Java?
If so, go for Eclipse technologies: SWT and JFace. The latter provides you with org.eclipse.jface.text package with a lot of features. Then you can roll own editor easily basing on that. (I prefer Eclipse-based editors to Scintilla-based, I believe they tend to be more advanced and feature-rich, but that's my personal opinion.)
But then, you might want to go a step further and use the Eclipse RCP framework for you application... But then why not use the Eclipse IDE itself and just add whatever you want as plug-ins.
The Eclipse codebase is huge and it's up to you how much you want to reuse.
I would expend some effort experimenting with the emacs colour theme package and the various langauge modes; see if you can bend the lisp to do what you want. You almost certainly can. to my mind emacs and a bit of effort on your part will get you your ultimate editor (remember emacs is really just a DIY editor toolkit). If you cant bend emacs into the shape you want you will be well placed to expend the effort in writing your own.
I have tried to do something similar myself for a project I'm working on at the moment, I looked into the QScintilla and had to remove it from my project because when you embedded inside a QGraphicsView I can't control the resolution of the widgets image, it seems to paint the text as an image and that's what we see, I played with increasing the smoothness of the QFont and that improved it but still a no-go.
So I found a simple code editor inside QT's code base it comes with every installation of QT if you look
into:
C:\Qt\4.7.3\src\scripttools\debugging\qscriptedit.h
C:\Qt\4.7.3\src\scripttools\debugging\qscriptedit.cpp
If you go to the source code of OpenShapeFactory where I'm trying to embed a Code Editor: check how I got the syntax Highlighter and the autocomplete :
this widget uses the qscriptedit widget that ships with qt, you can add your own keywords to the syntax hightlighter from a file as well as for the auto-complete dropdownlist.
this is the header, scriptwidget.h and the implementation scriptwidget.cpp are available as part of the whole project code.
the next stage is to look into the QTCreator and see the code they already have all if not most of these features after you get to compile their version, just find where to add your little mods and you might be getting closer to the simple code editor.
I wish you the best of luck on this direction and if you find a solution please send it over, :)
heads-up keep a lookout for the repository link above, if I find a way of making it first, I might chase you to the answer.
Like everyone else is saying, it's probably more trouble than it's worth, but if you really want to do it, Qt's a good choice since it's cross platform. Use QSyntaxHighlighter to do your keyword/type highlighting, and take full advantage Qt's support for keyboard shortcuts.
use something like C, QT and Lua for the scripting engine.
For my school project, I would like to build a gui that someone else can use to create a gui. Upon some research I saw lot of gui builders but didn't see anything along the lines of what I am looking for.
But then I did find a tutorial using C# on here
I rather create this gui editor for linux environment.
Any suggestions to where I should start? what tools I can use? Any links to any tutorials?
Any help/direction would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. I would like to add that it only needs to be very simple. like few text input fields and some button type fields that user can arrange in the order desired.
I would recommend that you not try to build your own GUI builder. It is a daunting task that you will not be able to accomplish as a school project. C++ is fully-compiled, which means that it lacks almost every feature that enables people to build meta-tools (like GUI editors) for it. This mainly has to do with the fact that C++ does not have runtime reflection (natively, anyway). Beyond that, there is no "one GUI toolkit and/or paradigm to rule them all." This makes your problem incredibly difficult to deal with.
So: I would recommend Qt, because it works on a ton of platforms, is easy to use and is just plain awesome. You could also look at the billions of other GUI toolkits like Gtk+, Tk, FLTK, YAAF, GLUI, dlib, CLX...
I'm aware that this does not actually answer the question. However, I do not think that the author is aware of how incredibly difficult the task he has set in front of himself is.
I would recommend starting by implementing it like an interpreter. Start with a very simple command line tool that takes commands like window(300, 400, "window1") and button(50,100, "button1") etc and output the code (native or whatever other GUI code you want), to a file. The goal should be to output a file that can be run and show the GUI that was designed. Once you have that, build a GUI that uses the command line functions as a back-end.
I don't have any exact links to this, but here's an example of what you could do. Gtk has the option of loading a GUI by using a class called GtkBuilder. Glade (the usual Gtk gui editor) has support for outputting it's result as an XML file that the GtkBuilder class then reads.
It would be possible for your program to output an equivalently formed XML file that GtkBuilder could read.
I have no clue as to how difficult it would be to target that XML though.
You should use GTK+ or Qt if you are targeting the linux environment. I think the first step is to learn how to program gui, which takes some time considering you are writing c/c++ code wich is different from higher level languages. Don't you think learning to code gui programs and writing a gui builder at the same time is a little bit too much.? First you should master the basics about gui and then go on to harder projects.
Here's a link to an excellent book on gtk. (Foundations of gtk+ development - Andrew Krause)
http://books.google.com/books?id=L1BZZYRrqSgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=foundations+krause&hl=es&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
And here's a great tutorial/cookbook for gtk+.
http://zetcode.com/tutorials/gtktutorial/
The official documentation is on library.gnome.org
My final advice is learn one thing at a time.
We currently maintain a suit of MFC applications that are fairly well designed, however the user interface is beginning to look tired and a lot of the code is in need quite a bit of refactoring to tidy up some duplication and/or performance problems. We make use of quite a few custom controls that handle all their own drawing (all written using MFC).
Recently I've been doing more research into Qt and the benefits it provides (cross-platform and supports what you might call a more "professional" looking framework for UI development).
My question is - what would be the best approach to perhaps moving to the Qt framework? Does Qt play nice with MFC? Would it be better to start porting some of our custom controls to Qt and gradually integrate more and more into our existing MFC apps? (is this possible?).
Any advice or previous experience is appreciated.
In my company, we are currently using Qt and are very happy with it.
I personnally never had to move a MFC-app into using the Qt framework, but here is something which might be of some interest for you :
Qt/MFC Migration Framework
Qt/MFC Migration Framework
It's part of Qt-Solutions, so this means you'll have to buy a Qt license along with a Qt-Solutions license. (edit: not any more)
I hope this helps !
(This doesn't really answer your specific questions but...)
I haven't personally used Qt, but it's not free for commercial Windows development.
Have you looked at wxWindows which is free? Nice article here. Just as an aside, if you wanted a single code base for all platforms, then you may have to migrate away from MFC - I am pretty sure (someone will correct if wrong) that MFC only targets Windows.
One other option would be to look at the Feature Pack update to MFC in SP1 of VS2008 - it includes access to new controls, including the Office style ribbon controls.
It's a tricky problem, and I suspect that the answer depends on how much time you have. You will get a much better result if you port your custom controls to Qt - if you use the QStyle classes to do the actual drawing then you'll end up with theme-able code right out of the box.
In general, my advice would be to bite the bullet and go the whole way at once. Sure, it might take longer, but the alternative is to spend an age trying to debug code that doesn't quite play ball, and end up writing more code to deal with minor incompatibilities between the two systems (been there, done that).
So, to summarise, my advice is to start a branch and rip out all your old MFC code and replace it with Qt. You'll get platform independence (almost) for free, and while it will take a while, you'll end up with a much nicer product at the end of it.
One final word of warning: make sure you take the time to understand the "Qt way of doing things" - in some cases it can be quite different to the MFC approach - the last thing you want to do is to end up with MFC-style Qt code.
I have lead a team doing this kind of thing before (not MFC to QT but the principles should work).
First we documented the dialogs and what their inputs, controls and outputs were. Also, we create several test cases especially for any clever logic inside the GUI.
Sometimes we had to refactor some business logic to provide a clean interface the GUIs but this is the way it should have been done in the first place tbh.
Now we had a list of GUIs, inputs, outputs, tests and an interface that the encapsulated GUI had to match.
We began, project by project, to create equivilant GUIs to the old ones. Once we did that we could slot the GUI in where the old one was, rebuild and test it. At first we tripped a lot but we soon worked out the common errors and fixed them. We navigated (I think) 612 dialogs although there was a team of about a dozen of us working on it.