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Qt Design Studio 1.0
- electricslpnsld 8y agoLooks like this is mainly QtQuick? Has anyone had success getting platform native-(ish) looking and behaving Desktop applications working in QtQuick? I have a few applications running on QWidgets which I'd like to port over for performance reasons (QWidgets has known performance problems on high-DPI Apple platforms they probably won't ever fix), but QtQuick apps tend to behave like off-brand tablet apps, out of the box.
- alien1993 8y agoYou could use Quick Controls 2, they can be styled easily. http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquickcontrols2-index.html http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquickcontrols2-index.html
- Elv13 8y agoRight now this is less and less "important". QtQuick.Controls2 fill that niche a bit, but it isn't the point. To them, the world has moved on. Web apps have zero consistency and people prefer them. There is also little money left in desktop application development. Qt on Android and iOS targets the "good enough" rather than driving their business. The people who will choose Qt for mobile don't do it for consistency. The money is on IoT and embedded. This is where having a certified platform with support is important. It's also where you can't use the OpenSource license and have to pay for the commercial one. It's also where having native UX is absolutely irrelevant. In a way, it's hard to argue about any of that. It's sad, but unavoidable.
- Multicomp 8y agoGood looking piece of software. I know QT is this big powerful thing, but where does this fit in compared to QtQuick/QML/QtCreator and so on? My frame of reference is .NET desktop development FWIW, but this looks like some cross between VS Blend and Adobe Flash/Animate. I'm pretty sure that is incorrect, can someone please enlighten me?
- rhodysurf 8y agoQt Widgets can be wired up graphically with QtDesigner but AFAIK that program does not work with QML, which is basically modern Qt. So this looks like a design tool for creating QML interfaces. The animation parts come in because QML allows for embedding javascript so you can probably do all of that graphically now and get QML code out
- joezydeco 8y agoYeah, this is just another step closer to the holy grail of letting Photoshop users create live UIs out of mockups. Hooking QML into actually doing something useful? That's a whole different can of worms.
- sktrdie 8y agoWhy can't we have this for the web? :(
- xemoka 8y agoWhat about something like Pinegrow?
- panic 8y agoIn order to have native-quality text editing on the web, you need to use the DOM. Using the DOM limits what kind of UI you can have.
- CyberDildonics 8y agoI don't see how that makes any sense at all. What is the actual limiting factor?
- slededit 8y agoThat's actually the limiting factor, otherwise you could just compile Qt to WASM and draw to a canvas. To render text nicely you need to know the geometry of the screen so you can anti-alias properly. A canvas goes through a series of transforms that work fine for images but garble text.
- gmueckl 8y agoQt can be compiled to WASM and the resulting demos were looking good to me. Where did you experience problems with canvases?
- panic 8y agoThe look of the text is just the tip of the iceberg. Many text editing operations are tightly integrated with the operating system and impossible to implement without an editable element. For example, on recent iPads you can move the cursor around by swiping the keyboard with two fingers. I don't know how you'd support this gesture without creating an actual editable element on the page.
- pier25 8y agoThis new version of Flash Pro is looking great! Oh wait...
- Keyframe 8y agoMy impression is that tools, over the last few years and no matter the stack they're for, have kind of converged onto where Flash was eons ago. Remember when web was littered with 2advanced clones? Looks like we've abandoned Flash, but never gave up the idea.
- emmanueloga_ 8y agoAgreed! I always come to this conclusion as well. A product that I've been keeping an eye on is Subform [1]. Apart from Flash-esque design tools, it includes more or less "novel" ways of defining the layout of the app. I think the layout tools set this product apart form similar offers. One of the main developers has a talk about the philosophy behind the UI of this app [2]. The same team is working on an app to use state machines to define UI interactions, which is also super interesting [3]. 1: https://subformapp.com/ https://subformapp.com/ 2: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/kevin-lynagh-choosing-features https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/kevin-lynagh-choosing-f... 3: https://sketch.systems/ https://sketch.systems/.
- phenotype 8y agothese are really nice looking tools.
- mygo 8y ago> A product that I've been keeping an eye on is Subform Dude, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but subform shut down, during beta. I also was keeping track of it and hoping it would launch. sketch.systems is created by the same people though, and sketch.systems is pretty much their pivot. not quite the same thing but it seems to be receiving a better response in the market.
- emmanueloga_ 8y agoIs that so! Such a pity, this product looked really promising! I just saw that they haven't updated the blog since March or so, but I wasn't sure since their forum is invite only. Did they announce this somewhere? Perhaps they are taking a break from subform to work on sketch.systems.
- emmanueloga_ 8y agoSo QML and QT design tools are awesome! I think nothing matches the capabilities of this platform. Still, each time I think of using QT I get discouraged (a bit) by the licensing (even though there's almost zero chance I'll ever independently sell a software product! :-p). In paper, one should be able to use the community version of QT for commercial software, but it looks like actually doing this could be really tricky [1]. And the commercial license is so expensive! QT page says: "Pricing starts at $459/mo." :-O. 1: https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-the-free-QT-for-c++-commercially https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-the-free-QT-for-c++-commerci...
- nabla9 8y agoHow is it tricky? Unless you start to mess with the QT libraries directly, there should be no problems whatsoever. You just attach unmodified object files and/or source code (as you did not make changes to them) into the software distribution.
- irishcoffee 8y agoQt is lgpl. Unless I missed something, this should not be a problem whatsoever if you'd like to use the Qt framework and sell commercial software.
- hjek 8y agoExactly. No problem whatsoever selling something made using Qt[0]. But there is a "problem" using Qt to release proprietary software, of course, because Qt is free, and perhaps parent isn't aware of the distinction between commercial and proprietary? [0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- SwellJoe 8y agoLGPL is not GPL. You're adding to the confusion by conflating them.
- munk-a 8y agoThis is incorrect, using LGPL licensed software does not prevent you from keeping your software closed source, any components you rely on from Qt will need to be provided (or reference given which is a _really_ weak requirement) in open source but any functions referencing Qt functions do not themselves need to be provided in a decompiled form, this is pretty much why LGPL exists. So if you're company is trying to make money making proprietary improvements to Qt _which require you to edit Qt_ then you're a bit hooped, but I strongly suspect instead there was a misunderstanding which how contagious free software is. (That said, whenever possible please give back to the FSF community)
- qwerty456127 8y agoAny tutorial on building a cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows) desktop GUI app with this?
- irishcoffee 8y agoI think you just write qt, it's already cross-platform.
- munk-a 8y agoThat's correct, there may be some platform specific things you can dig down deep enough to find but generally speaking you have to misuse the library to actually build something that isn't cross-platform.
- qwerty456127 8y agoWell, Ok, I mean any good tutorial on making a desktop app with Qt Design Studio. I expected it to be something like a better Qt Designer which is reasonably intuitive to use but in the video it looks completely extraterrestrial although beautiful. I'd like to build a desktop app with it but don't feel like I have any idea about how. The only tutorial video easy to find shows "Building an Instrument Cluster for Your Car HMI" and doesn't seem to make it clear how is the app supposed to interact with the computer it is ran on. Is it for cars only? Is it not supposed to be used for desktop apps development?
- Elv13 8y agoThe old QtDesigner was simple enough. If you want to create classic desktop applications, use it. QML is closer to a game engine than a widget toolkit. It is intended to provide an easy way to animate everything and create custom looks. It feel alien for a few months before you "get it". It is very powerful and easy to use, but the learning curve is steep and when you hit the limitations of the framework, have fun making any progress beyond it. It's also a bit hostile to native and modern code. Shared pointers are ignored and crashy. The binding between C++ and QML is also not the fastest thing in the universe. I am writing complex apps using both as my bread and butter. I would not recommend QML for quick prototyping of complex apps. QtDesigner/QtWidgets still beat it. However if you need touch or fluid and modern looking GUI, QtWidget is a dead end and QML/QtStudio shine. It's really a project per project choice. They fill different niches.
- RyLuke 8y agoIf you're interested in this sort of thing (design-oriented IDEs targeting runtimes/frameworks), there are a few other similar tools: + Rightware Kanzi (https://www.rightware.com/kanzi https://www.rightware.com/kanzi) + DiSTI GL Studio (https://www.disti.com/user-interface/gl-studio/ https://www.disti.com/user-interface/gl-studio/) + Altia (https://www.altia.com/ https://www.altia.com/) Most of them have found niche markets in verticals like automotive/medical/embedded, where it's easier to just ship a runtime for the UI. UI/UX designers working on the dominant platforms (web/mobile) have a lot of nostalgia for Flash--particularly the perceived ability to actually ship functioning product. There's no lack of new tools trying to improve on the status quo: drawing pictures of UI and throwing them over the wall for developers to figure out how to implement. I suspect that we haven't seen the aforementioned IDEs become industry standard for a couple reasons: + They're by nature more difficult to use than drawing tools, often surfacing a lot of advanced parameters, state machines, and code + The variability in languages/frameworks/platforms inherent in web and native development make usable output a much harder problem than having everyone all-in on a single framework/runtime
- pjmlp 8y ago+ They are mostly commercial and a large set of Web developers are allergic to pay for tools. https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.outsystems.com/ https://www.outsystems.com/ https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/ https://www.fluidui.com/ https://www.fluidui.com/
- sxp62000 8y agoWhat is Qt? Can someone explain it like i'm 5? The video in that blog post makes it look really scary!
- PeCaN 8y agoIt's like Electron except it allows you to make usable applications.
- gmueckl 8y agoQt is a set of interoperating libraries for the development of cross-platform graphical applications. It covers a lot of topics from abstracting basis operating system services to various ways to create the actual UI (with traditional widget hierarchies instantiated in C++ code, declaratively using QML...) and advanced features like embedded webkit or interfacing with OpenGL or Vulkan. The library has two core strengths: it works on virtually every platform that can run a GUI and the application code can be made to be pretty much agnostic of the underlying OS. Unless an application uses OS interfaces directly for fancy things, most of the porting work is just recompiling the code.
- sxp62000 8y agoI noticed on the Qt website that it's used in everything from car dashboards to coffee machine interfaces. Is there a special reason for this? Is Qt hard to get into?
- gmueckl 8y agoIt is used for even more than that. KDE, the Linux desktop environment with its huge set of applications has used Qt since its early releases in the 90s. There is also a large set of commercial desktop applications for Windows and macOS that use Qt. That Qt is used for embedded software UIs is a comparably recent development in its long history. I think the reason for this is that Qt has extremely high quality widgets and graphical elements. They allow you to do things out of the box that would be crazy hacks with most of the competitors. And the options for styling the UIs are very good, too, which matters a lot for these embedded use cases. Is Qt hard to get into? Yes and no. In C++, you are required to use some mechanisms like signals/slots, which are used for routing events. These features look like non-standard language extensions and rely on a special source code preprocessor to generate the glue code that is implied. The other concepts are easier to pick up. And the toolkit is very consistent in the structure of its interfaces, so once you pick up the patterns, you can get very productive.
- nicodjimenez 8y agoAwesome marketing video for an under hyped product! My startup abandoned .NET in favor of Qt to develop a cross platform screenshot app to digitize math equations because we wanted Linux support (https://mathpix.com https://mathpix.com) and it's delivered. We still use Swift for our Mac app. The thing about .NET is that it's not nearly as seamless as a development stack as Swift + the whole Mac ecosystem. Whatever clunkiness exists in Qt apps already exists 10x in the Windows ecosystem of clunkiness everywhere, because Windows itself is, in a sense, cross platform. So the difference between a Qt app a .NET app is not super noticeable on Windows. A good Qt app will be very nearly as good as a good .NET app, and a good Swift app on MacOS beats them all by a landslide.
- CamperBob2 8y agoand a good Swift app on MacOS beats them all by a landslide. In what sense(s) does the final application end up better?
- oppositelock 8y agoI ported a popular Google application from Windows to OS X using Qt Designer (and Qt in general) a number of years ago. Qt is really good for quick bringup of a cross platform app, and Designer and its associated code generator does a good job of generating reasonable UI's. Swift didn't exist at the time, but the combination of InterfaceBuilder and Cocoa was amazing. Where things start to get tricky is that Qt has to reimplement a lot of widgets themselves, on account of their target platforms being quite different from each other, so you end up with a slightly non-native feel on each platform, and some behaviors are subtly different. Things have gotten better since then, but that non-native behavior is still there. These behavioral differences aren't too bad on Windows and X11, since those platforms have a lot of inconsistency between apps, but mac users expect the mac to "feel" a certain way, and Qt is a little different, so we got a _lot_ of feedback, some of which I still remember - "Google Earth looks like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down". The tradeoff you have with a cross platform toolkit like Qt is quick bringup of a cross platform app, versus later chasing down a lot of platform differences causing problems, and that slight non-nativeness. The alternative is to write your UI natively on each platform and abstract away the functional core from the UI, which is a lot more work but works better. If I was building a UI for major public consumption today, I would go with the extra work of native UI. If I was building tooling for my own developers, hands down, I'd use Qt.
- bun_at_work 8y ago> an effective workflow fosters and boosts product innovation Is there a way to use this without Boost?
- mrfredward 8y agoYou only have to include one hpp and use the Boost::ProductInnovation namespace. It's easy and the installer will only use a quarter of your hdd.
- pzo 8y agoDoes anyone have experience if it is currently possible to use QT open source license for commercial iOS app distributed on App Store? People seems divided about that.