The Qt project developers announced the release of Qt Design Studio 1.3, an environment for designing the user interface and developing graphical applications based on Qt. Qt Design Studio simplifies collaboration between designers and developers to create functional prototypes of complex and scalable interfaces.
Designers can focus on graphic design only, while developers can focus on developing application logic using automatically generated QML code for designer designs.
Using the workflow offered by Qt Design Studio, can turn designs prepared in Photoshop or other graphic editors into working prototypes suitable to run on real devices in minutes.
A commercial version and a community edition of Qt Design Studio are available. The commercial version is delivered free of charge, it allows the distribution of ready-made interface components only to holders of a commercial Qt license. The Community Edition does not impose restrictions on use, but does not include modules for importing Photoshop and Sketch graphics.
What's new in Qt Design Studio 1.3?
With the release of this new version of Qt Design Studio 1.3 the capabilities of the Qt Bridge for Sketch module have been expandedWhich lets you create ready-to-use components based on designs prepared in Sketch and export them to QML code.
Also new support for replacing characters in the module is highlighted, allowing different text properties to be linked to different instances of buttons and other interface components (these properties are exported to QML with overridden properties visible as component properties).
Alson Added ability to export graphics in vector SVG format (previously only raster formats were supported), which can be scaled in QML.
The appearance of the interface to view properties has been changed, it has been translated to use Qt Quick Controls 2 and is now fully customizable through themes.
The convenience of working with rotating shapes was also significantly improved, for which drag and drop support has appeared and the possibility of optionally adding a slider control. Support for multi-section blocks was added, allowing you to set properties for multiple items at once.
As well as also a new curve editor for animation, which allows you to adjust interpolation curves for multiple keyframes in a view, similar to the usual animation control tools in 3D packages.
A new gradient management dialog has been added to the property editor. The color editor has been updated, in which a section with previously selected colors appears. The link editor has been improved and is now based on a more convenient widget for editing code for QML.
Also noted is work that has yet to be completed to create a WebAssembly-based QML viewer, which allows you to package QML projects for the Web, with which you can work through a browser.
How to install Qt Design Studio 1.3 on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install this development environment, they can do so by following the instructions that we share below.
Since Qt Design Studio has two versions in this new release (basically the paid version and the free one).
In this case we will focus on the Qt Design Studio Community Edition, which we can obtain from the link below.
Or we can open a terminal in our system and in it we are going to type the following command:
wget https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qtdesignstudio/1.3.0/qt-designstudio-linux-x86_64-1.3.0-community.run -O qtdesign.run
Once the download is done, we give execution permissions to the file with:
sudo chmod +x qtdesign.run
And we can execute the file with:
./qtdesign.run
Finally for those interested in the paid version or curious to try it, the developers offer the commercially licensed packages available through an online installer.
The link to try the paid version is this.