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Qt Designer is a visual design tool that makes designing and implementing user interfaces a lot easier.
Here's a brief overview of its key features. For further information, start Qt Designer and select Manual from the Help menu.
Qt Designer was a pure dialog editor in Qt 2.2 but has now been extended to provide the full functionality of a GUI design tool.
This includes the ability to lay out main windows with menus and toolbars. Actions can be edited within Qt Designer and then plugged into toolbars and menu bars via drag and drop. Splitters can now be used in a way similar to layouts to group widgets horizontally or vertically.
In Qt 2.2, many of the dialogs created by Qt Designer had to be subclassed to implement functionality beyond the predefined signal and slot connections. Whilst the subclassing approach is still fully supported, Qt Designer now offers an alternative: a plugin for editing slots. The editor offers features such as syntax highlighting, completion, parentheses matching and incremental search.
The functionality of Qt Designer can now be extended via plugins. Using Qt Designer's interface or by implementing one of the provided interfaces in a plugin, a two way communication between plugin and Qt Designer can be established. This functionality is used to implement plugins for custom widgets, so that they can be used as real widgets inside the designer.
Qt Designer fully supports Qt's SQL module. All SQL widgets can be laid out within Qt Designer, and relationships can be established between controls visually. Many interactions can be defined purely in terms of Qt's signals/slots mechanism directly in Qt Designer.
Basic support for project management has been added. This allows you to read and edit *.pro files, add and remove files to/from the project and do some global operations on the project. You can now open the project file and have one-click access to all the *.ui forms in the project.
In addition to generating code via uic, Qt Designer now supports the dynamic creation of widgets directly from XML user interface description files (*.ui files) at runtime. This eliminates the need of recompiling your application when the GUI changes, and could be used to enable your customers to do their own customizations. Technically, the feature is provided by a new class, QWidgetFactory in the QResource library.
The designer offers all the strength of the Qt layout system with a a well-designed point and click interface. Geometry management makes an application adjust automatically to language changes, different GUI styles on different target platforms and different desktop settings like font sizes.
In the designer, you can connect signals to slots by dragging a line with the connection tool.
In its output, the designer quotes user strings with a tr-macro. Thus it works well together with Qt's built-in or any other i18n system.
Both widgets and layouts can be nested in a hierarchy, just like in hand-crafted Qt code.
The unlimited undo and redo system makes it simple to try different arrangements of the widgets until the result satisfies you.
Qt Designer uses a generic and very powerful property editor for most widget properties. Special editors for some widgets (like listboxes or comboboxes) allow you to fill these widgets with content without writing extra code.
A graphical tab-order tool makes it possible to edit the tabfocus chain intuitively with point and click.
Qt Designer checks that your keyboard shortcuts don't clash.
The designer's native file format (*.ui files) is a well-defined true XML format.
No need to modify generated code. If you need extended functionality inside a generated dialog, you can easily do this by subclassing. With Qt 3.0 you can also write code directly in Qt Designer so you don't have to subclass if you don't want to.
No need to add generated code to the source repository of your version control system. With Qt Designer, you only deal with ui files. The uic compiler will then integrate the necessary C++ code on the fly during compile time.
If you use Visual Studio (tm), we provide tighter integration with a plugin.
Hit F1 to launch Qt Assistant the new help browser that supports and search capabilities.
If you are interested in the Qt Professional Edition or the Qt Enterprise Edition, please write to sales@trolltech.com. In case you have any bug reports, suggestions or wishes, send them to qt-bugs@trolltech.com. Other mail can be sent to info@trolltech.com.
Copyright © 2001 Trolltech | Trademarks | Qt version 3.0.0-beta3
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