Nexsys: Main Window Ui (Part IV)

In this section we're going to finish up our main window by adding some icons to our actions, and then look into how to reuse them for a toolbar.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui (Part III)

At this point we have a pretty well blocked out interface for our main window.  There are still a couple more steps that we're going to do in designer before we jump back into the, to make sure we get the most out of our interface builder.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui (Part II)

Now that we have our menu's and actions flushed out, we can start adding in the main components to our central widget.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui

If you've made it this far, then you will know that our main window is really dull.  It pops up at random, doesn't load anything and generally is rather unimpressive.

This is where we start actually putting some information into our appliction and make it look like an actual application.

PyQt Coding Style Guidelines (Cont.)

One of the aspects of developing consistent code is having a common naming style.  We talked about this for the Designer a bit in the last post - and we'll go into it a bit more in depth now.

PyQt Coding Style Guidelines

One of the most important thing a developer can do is develop clean, consistent, code.  Develop a style and follow it.  It will make reading your code much easier for other people, and even yourself, if you have to go back to something you wrote much earlier.

This is a series of coding standards that I follow when I develop PyQt applications - which is a mixture of the Python and Qt guidelines to try to make clean, consistent applications.  Coding style guides are often disagreed on, so take these with a grain of salt - I've thought about them a lot, but you may not agree with my reasoning...which is perfectly good.  The important thing is to develop consistency more than any one style.

Comparison of Loading Techniques

In the last tutorial we started working with Qt's Designer - which can greatly improve your coding workflow if you use it correctly.  It can also become very confusing for other developers if you don't cultivate a well organized structure to the way you integrate designer files into your project.

This tutorial will cover some tips and tricks that I've found make working with designer files, taking advantage of the power that is provided with Designer while keeping the code clean and easy to follow.

Introduction to Designer

The Qt Designer is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface for laying out the widgets for your applications.

It allows you to drag and drop widgets onto your custom class and lay them out with minimal effort and 0 code. Your template will then be saved out to an XML based file (a .ui file) format that you can read into your application.

In this tutorial, we'll re-do our last code using Qt's designer to create our actions and link everything together.