Uis

QtDD13 - Alan Alpert - Adaptable UIs with QtQuick

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• published: 14 Feb 2014
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Recorded at the Qt Developer Days in Berlin in 2013. Slides available at https://devdays.kdab.com/?page_id=225 Short Abstract: Modern mobile UIs have both high standards and diverse platforms. Naturally your application logic runs the same everywhere thanks to Qt, but for a pixel-perfect UI you may have to re-write the UI per device. Especially with devices starting to differentiate even within a single platform, such as the different form factors of the Z10 and Q10 BlackBerry devices. QtQuick is here to help, with expanded features in Qt 5.2 to minimize UI rewriting without compromising the expressive power and fine-grained control of QtQuick. Use bindings, loaders and file selectors to tweak your UI per device (or per platform) to allow pixel perfect design and extensive code sharing. While Z10 and Q10 are used as the examples, these are generic QtQuick techniques that apply just as well to conquering Android fragmentation as well as UIs crossing the desktop/mobile boundary. Abstract: Modern mobile UIs have both high standards and diverse platforms. Naturally your application logic runs the same everywhere thanks to Qt, but for a pixel-perfect UI you may have to re-write the UI per device. Especially with devices starting to differentiate even within a single platform, such as the different form factors of the Z10 and Q10 BlackBerry devices. QtQuick is here to help, with expanded features in Qt 5.2 to minimize UI rewriting without compromising the expressive power and fine-grained control of QtQuick. Use bindings, loaders and file selectors to tweak your UI per device (or per platform) to allow pixel perfect design and extensive code sharing. While Z10 and Q10 are used as the examples, these are generic QtQuick techniques that apply just as well to conquering Android fragmentation as well as UIs crossing the desktop/mobile boundaries. This is very similar to the adaptive web design craze that's currently going around. However QtQuick provides a more coherent and holistic story which allows for finer-grained control built in. This presentation will cover the following adaptive mechanisms and how they fit together. File selection, new in Qt 5.2, allows for easily integrated code reuse. Similar in effect to managing different QRC files per device, file selection can be controlled at runtime and is easier to manage and integrate into your workflow. Combined with the new singleton QML types they also provide an easy and efficient mechanism for centrally storing and swapping per-context settings. Bindings, the core of QML, allow for easily adpative UIs. Combined with the QtQuick.Layouts (new in 5.1) it's easy to write UIs that adapt to window or screen resizing. You can bind to screen size or DPI in order to smoothly adapt to a continuous range of DPIs, or use JS snippets to define your own buckets for fixed adapatations. Loaders can bring bindings and file selection together for extreme customization cases. You can swap out parts of UI scenes at any time in a declarative fashion. By combining these approaches intelligently, code duplication is minimized without compromising the high graphical standards for your UI. You still have full control and can reach pixel-perfect standards for each device, without needing to write and maintain multiple copies of the application UI. Presenter Biography: Alan has been developing Qt since he was a Trolltech employee, and was a member of the original Brisbane team which developed QML. His mission, continuing in Blackberry, is to support the creation of modern and pixel-perfect mobile UIs using Qt and QML. He is currently the QtQuick maintainer and spends most of his time developing further QML and QtQuick features.