QT, SSL, MSVC2008, and Windows

I want to build my QT apps natively on windows, not using QT's default mingw package and its giant support library.

The standard MSVC2008 QT Framework SDK binaries work great until you start using lots of bells and whistles like OpenSSL and SQLite. I got away with not having to install SQLite on the windows side of things, so here is the cookbook for OpenSSL 0.9.8g and QT 4.6.2

download and install the QT Framework SDK
* http://qt.nokia.com/downloads

download and install the prebuilt OpenSSL binary pacakges
* http://www.slproweb.com/download/
* install the 32b versions
configure and build QT with explicit directions to where to find OpenSSL

configure -release -confirm-license -plugin-sql-sqlite -plugin-sql-odbc -qt-libpng -qt-libjpeg -openssl-linked -opensource -no-incredibuild-xge -I "c:\OpenSSL\include" -L "c:\OpenSSL\lib"

* thirty minutes later you should see a happy message from configure
* nmake, and several hours later you'll be all set
* if you still have linking trouble copy all the OpenSSL .lib files into the qt\4.6.2\lib directory

simple fancy UIs

It's an oxymoron, but the QT engineer who described the Kinetic Declarative UI as "simple fancy UIs" is quite right, though perhaps expanding that to "A simple way to create fancy UIs" might be more clear.

QT Kinetic's Decarative UI is really a big deal. It allows you to create fun to use animated UIs with minimal lines of code. See the video and be amazed.




For fooling with Declarative UI QML directly you can just get by with the binary of the Kinetic QT Creator and the QML Previewer.


To really use QML in your apps you need the full source. I found navigating git painful, but the correct recipe to get the source tree is:

git clone “git://qt.gitorious.org/qt/kinetic/trees/kinetic-declarativeui”
git branch -a
git checkout -b kinetic-declarativeui origin/kinetic-declarativeui


pictureflow

Picture flow is free Coverflow QT widget. It looks beautiful.


My favorite thing about Delphi development was the vast array of off the shelf components (widgets in QT parlance) you could download/buy. I'm hoping QT starts to gain that same momentum.



pictureflow - Google Code

Embedded Widgets for QT

QT now has some stock widgets for touchscreen environments, they look like they'd be great for a Free Motion pointer UI as well


Embedded Widget Demos — Qt – A cross-platform application and UI framework