Chapter 3. Designing Your Application with Qt Designer

Qt is perhaps best known as a cross-platform user interface toolkit, and only in the last few years has Qt Creator really evolved to be a full software development environment. Even in its early releases, however, Qt had an excellent facility for building user interfaces with Qt Designer, now part of Qt Creator. More recently, the developers building Qt have added Qt Quick as a second option for user interface development. Qt Quick extends the Qt libraries and Qt Designer capabilities of Qt Creator to build fluid interfaces for touch screens and set-top boxes. This is facilitated by the declarative nature of Qt Quick and Qt Meta-Object Language (QML).

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Qt's notion of signals and slots
• Creating user interfaces with Qt Designer
• How to instantiate forms, messages, and dialogs
• Introduce Qt Quick's support for declarative UI development

At the end of this chapter, you'll be well equipped to decide whether your application should be written using Qt Widgets or Qt Quick, and to build your application with the help of the documentation that accompanies Qt Creator.