Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to create simple graphical user interfaces with Qt. We went through two approaches: designing the user interface with a graphical tool that generates most of the code for us, and creating user interface classes by writing all the code directly. None of them is better than the other. The form designer allows you to avoid boilerplate code and helps you handle large forms with a lot of controls. On the other hand, the code writing approach gives you more control over the process and allows you to create automatically populated and dynamic interfaces.

We also learned how to use signals and slots in Qt. You should now be able to create simple user interfaces and fill them with logic by connecting signals to slots—predefined ones as well as custom ones that you now know how to define and fill with code.

Qt contains many widget types, but we didn't introduce them to you one by one. There is a really nice explanation of many widget types in the Qt manual called Qt Widget Gallery, which shows most of them in action. If you have any doubts about using any of those widgets, you can check the example code and also look up the appropriate class in the Qt reference manual to learn more about them.

As you already saw, Qt allows you to create custom widget classes, but in this chapter our custom classes mostly reused the default widgets. It's also possible to modify how the widget responds to events and implement custom painting. We will get to this advanced topic in Chapter 8, Custom Widgets. However, if you want to implement a game with custom 2D graphics, there is a simpler alternative—the Graphics View Framework that we'll use in the next chapter.