Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

Trolltech provides platform- and industry-specific components and tools, as well as cutting-edge components too new to include directly in Qt, to Qt Enterprise license holders as Qt Solutions. We expect to release new components each quarter. In this article, we will review the components that are available so far. Check out www.trolltech.com/products/solutions/ regularly or read Qt Quarterly to keep up-to-date about new components.

GUI applications that are network clients shouldn't freeze up during networking operations. This article compares two different ways of keeping a networking client's user interface responsive: using the non-blocking QSocket class, and using a blocking QSocketDevice in a separate thread.

Forms that have lots of line edits often use a grid layout with labels in the first column and line edits in the second column. This looks attractive, except that fields that can only accept a short amount of text, say one or two characters, are given the same width as fields that can take a long line of text. This deprives users of the visual cue that proportional widths would give. This article provides a simple solution.

Qt provides support for MDI (Multiple Document Interface) through its QWorkspace widget. The workspace provides two strategies for laying out its child widgets. In this article we will show how easy it is to add new layout strategies to QWorkspace.

Applications that allow the user to open multiple documents, perhaps of different types, must ensure that the user interface is appropriate for the current document, with the right menu options and toolbar buttons enabled or disabled appropriately. For large applications with many actions, it is easy to forget to update all the relevant actions when the user changes documents. This article presents an abstraction that can solve the problem: a signal multiplexer.

This article provides answers to some frequently asked questions about internationalizing Qt applications. It covers such topics as distributing translation files, reverse translations, and dynamic language switching.

Qt provides support for MDI (Multiple Document Interface) through its QWorkspace widget. The workspace provides two strategies for laying out its child widgets. In this article we will show how easy it is to add new layout strategies to QWorkspace.

Qt offers many ways of providing online help. These include tool tips, "What's This?" messages, and access to dedicated help progams like Qt Assistant. Sometimes we want to provide more help on a particular widget than can comfortably fit in a tool tip or "What's This?" message, and we want to be able to take the user to the relevant help without forcing them to search or scroll for it. The solution is to provide context-sensitive help for the current widget.

QTextEdit can be used to provide a simple text editor within an application. QTextEdit provides a lot of functionality out of the box, but one feature it doesn't provide is automatic completion. In this article, we present a QTextEdit subclass that provides completion and that demonstrates how to extend and enhance QTextEdit's functionality.

We often need to constrain user input for particular widgets. Qt provides many ways of doing this, but for some complex data types we may want to provide our own "value picker" that lets the user pop up a little dialog through which they can choose a valid value. In this article we present a small calendar popup that demonstrates the necessary techniques.

In Issue 7 we asked for the longest gramatically correct English sentence that consists entirely of Qt 3.2.0 function names, e.g. ``take back all animated green children'' (6 words).