Book Image

Hands-On Mobile and Embedded Development with Qt 5

By : Lorn Potter
Book Image

Hands-On Mobile and Embedded Development with Qt 5

By: Lorn Potter

Overview of this book

Qt is a world-class framework, helping you to develop rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and multi-platform applications that run on all major desktop platforms and most mobile or embedded platforms. The framework helps you connect the dots across platforms and between online and physical experience. This book will help you leverage the fully-featured Qt framework and its modular cross-platform library classes and intuitive APIs to develop applications for mobile, IoT, and industrial embedded systems. Considerations such as screen size, device orientation changes, and small memory will be discussed. We will focus on various core aspects of embedded and mobile systems, such as connectivity, networking, and sensors; there is no IoT without sensors. You will learn how to quickly design a flexible, fast, and responsive UI that looks great. Going further, you will implement different elements in a matter of minutes and synchronize the UI elements with the 3D assets with high precision. You will learn how to create high-performance embedded systems with 3D/2D user interfaces, and deploy and test on your target hardware. The book will explore several new features, including Qt for WebAssembly. At the end of this book, you will learn about creating a full software stack for embedded Linux systems using Yocto and Boot to Qt for Device Creation.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Standard Qt Widgets

Qt Widgets are not the new kid on the block, but they still do have their place in applications that target mobile and embedded devices. They are well formed, predictable and have standard UI elements.

Recognizable UI elements are found in Qt Widgets and work great on laptops, which are simply mobile desktops. In this chapter, you will learn to design standard looking applications. Basic widgets such as menus, icons, and lists will be discussed with an emphasis on how to constrain the user interface to medium and small-sized displays. Topics we will discuss include how to use Qt's dynamic layouts to handle orientation changes. Classes such as QGraphicsScene, QGraphicsView, and QGraphicsItem will be used. Layout API such as QVBoxLayout, QGridLayout, and QStackedLayout will be discussed.

In this chapter we will cover:

  • Using Qt Creator and Qt Widgets to create a mobile app and run on the device
  • Differences between desktop and mobile apps including screen size, memory, gestures
  • Using Qt Widgets in dynamic layouts for easy screen size and orientation changes
  • Using QGraphicsView for graphical apps