Chapter 1, Creating Your First Qt Application, takes you through the fundamental concepts of Qt, such as signals and slots, and helps you create your first Qt and Qt Quick applications.

Chapter 2, Building a Beautiful Cross-platform Clock, teaches you how to read and write configurations and handle cross-platform development.

Chapter 3, Cooking an RSS Reader with Qt Quick, demonstrates how to develop a stylish RSS Reader in QML, which is a script language quite similar to JavaScript.

Chapter 4, Controlling Camera and Taking Photos, shows you how to access camera devices through the Qt APIs and make use of the status and menu bars.

Chapter 5, Extending Paint Applications with Plugins, teaches you how to make applications extendable and write plugins, by using the Paint application as as an example.

Chapter 6, Getting Wired and Managing Downloads, shows you how to utilize Qt's network module using the progress bar, as well as learning about threaded programming in Qt.

Chapter 7, Parsing JSON and XML Documents to Use Online APIs, teaches you how to parse JSON and XML documents in both Qt/C++ and Qt Quick/QML, which is essential to obtain data from online APIs.

Chapter 8, Enabling Your Qt Application to Support Other Languages, demonstrates how to make internationalized applications, translate strings using Qt Linguist, and then load translation files dynamically.

Chapter 9, Deploying Applications on Other Devices, shows you how to package and make your applications redistributable on Windows, Linux, and Android.

Chapter 10, Don't Panic When You Encounter These Issues, gives you some solutions and advice for common issues during Qt and Qt Quick application development and shows you how to debug Qt and Qt Quick applications.

Qt is cross-platform, which means you can use it on almost all operating systems, including Windows, Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X. The hardware requirements are listed as follows:

An Android phone or tablet is not required, but is recommended so that you can test applications on a real Android device.

All the software mentioned in this book, including Qt itself, is free of charge and can be downloaded from the Internet.

If you are a programmer looking for a truly cross-platform GUI framework to help you save time by side-stepping issues involving incompatibility between different platforms and building applications using Qt 5 for multiple targets, this book is most certainly intended for you. It is assumed that you have basic programming experience of C++.

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: "The UI files are under the Forms directory."

A block of code is set as follows:

#include "mainwindow.h"
#include <QApplication>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    QApplication a(argc, argv);
    MainWindow w;
    w.show();

    return a.exec();
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

#include <QStyleOption>
#include <QPainter>
#include <QPaintEvent>
#include <QMouseEvent>
#include <QResizeEvent>
#include "canvas.h"

Canvas::Canvas(QWidget *parent) :
  QWidget(parent)
{
}

void Canvas::paintEvent(QPaintEvent *e)
{
  QPainter painter(this);

  QStyleOption opt;
  opt.initFrom(this);
  this->style()->drawPrimitive(QStyle::PE_Widget, &opt, &painter, this);

  painter.drawImage(e->rect().topLeft(), image);
}

void Canvas::updateImage()
{
  QPainter painter(&image);
  painter.setPen(QColor(Qt::black));
  painter.setRenderHint(QPainter::Antialiasing);
  painter.drawPolyline(m_points.data(), m_points.count());
  this->update();
}

void Canvas::mousePressEvent(QMouseEvent *e)
{
  m_points.clear();
  m_points.append(e->localPos());
  updateImage();
}

void Canvas::mouseMoveEvent(QMouseEvent *e)
{
  m_points.append(e->localPos());
  updateImage();
}

void Canvas::mouseReleaseEvent(QMouseEvent *e)
{
  m_points.append(e->localPos());
  updateImage();
}

void Canvas::resizeEvent(QResizeEvent *e)
{
  QImage newImage(e->size(), QImage::Format_RGB32);
  newImage.fill(Qt::white);
  QPainter painter(&newImage);
  painter.drawImage(0, 0, image);
  image = newImage;
  QWidget::resizeEvent(e);
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

..\..\bin\binarycreator.exe -c config\config.xml -p packages internationalization_installer.exe

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: " Navigate to File | New File or Project."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.