The continuous growth of the computer software market leads to a very competitive and challenging era. Not only does your software need to be functional and easy to use, it must also look appealing and professional to the users. In order to gain an upper hand and a competitive advantage over other software products in the market, the look and feel of your product is of utmost importance and should be taken care of early in the production stage. In this book, we will teach you how to create a functional, appealing, and user friendly software using the Qt5 development platform.
Chapter 1, Look and Feel Customization, shows how to design your program's user interface using both the Qt Designer as well as the Qt Quick Designer.
Chapter 2, States and Animations, explains how to animate your user interface widgets by empowering the state machine framework and the animation framework.
Chapter 3, QPainter and 2D Graphics, covers how to draw vector shapes and bitmap images on screen using Qt's built-in classes.
Chapter 4, OpenGL Implementation, demonstrates how to render 3D graphics in your program by integrating OpenGL in your Qt project.
Chapter 5, Building a Touch Screen Application with Qt5, explains how to create a program that works on a touch screen device.
Chapter 6, XML Parsing Made Easy, shows how to process data in the XML format and use it together with the Google Geocoding API to create a simple address finder.
Chapter 7, Conversion Library, covers how to convert between different variable types, image formats, and video formats using Qt's built-in classes as well as third-party programs.
Chapter 8, Accessing Databases, explains how to connect your program to an SQL database using Qt.
Chapter 9, Developing a Web Application Using Qt Web Engine, covers how to use the web rendering engine provided by Qt and develop programs that empower the web technology.
The following are the prerequisites for this book:
This book intended for those who want to develop software using Qt5. If you want to improve the visual quality and content presentation of your software application, this book will suit you best.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In the mylabel.cpp source file, define a function called SetMyObject() to save the object pointer."
A block of code is set as follows:
QSpinBox::down-button
{
image: url(:/images/spindown.png);
subcontrol-origin: padding;
subcontrol-position: right bottom;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
QSpinBox::down-button
{
image: url(:/images/spindown.png);
subcontrol-origin: padding;
subcontrol-position: right bottom;
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Go to the Imports tab in the Library window and add a Qt Quick module called QtQuick.Controls to your project."
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