Preface

Table of Contents
Introduction
What You Should Know
What's New in Designer?
Feedback

Introduction

This manual presents Qt Designer, a tool for designing and implementing user interfaces built with the Qt cross-platform application development framework. Qt Designer makes it easy to experiment with user interface design. At any time you can generate the code required to reproduce the user interface from the files Qt Designer produces, changing your design as often as you like. If you used the previous version you will find yourself immediately productive in the new version since the interface is fundamentally unchanged. But you will find new widgets and new and improved functionality which have been developed as a result of your feedback.

Qt Designer helps you build user interfaces with layout tools that move and scale your widgets (controls in Windows terminology) automatically at runtime. The resulting interfaces are both functional and attractive, comfortably suiting your users operating environments and preferences. Qt Designer supports Qt's signals and slots mechanism for type-safe communication between widgets. Qt Designer includes a code editor which you can use to embed your own custom slots inside the generated code. Those who prefer to separate generated code from hand crafted code can continue to use the subclassing approach pioneered in the first version of Qt Designer.

The manual is divided into two parts. The first part, chapters one to seven, consists of tutorials which introduce you to Qt Designer by leading you through the development of example applications. The second part, chapters eight to ten, provide a comprehensive reference to Qt Designer. The tutorial chapters are written to be as self-contained as possible, but all of them assume that you are familiar with the material in chapter one which covers the basics of building a Qt application with Designer. Here's a brief overview of the chapters: