Where's the UI Designer?

[barbara]

Barbra .... not sure CS wants to be in the business of redistributing Qt Creator. But I do agree CS should make it easy to obtain.

Getting it directly from Qt now a days requires "registration"... which just seems to open the door to aggravation. Just trying to maintain social distancing

If this whole processes is well documented, does this fill the need?

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I believe we may have overstated things in a prior post. Re-distributing their program is allowed however it would not be appropriate.

We can provide links to QtCreator and will instead move in this direction. This is actually nothing more involved than downloading CMake, Clang, or MinGW.

Barbara

[badoink]

Oh dear.

Two steps forward, three back?

[barbara]

Two steps forward, three back?

This is not actually a backwards move. We did a bit more research and there are real problems which simply prevent us from distributing an application which is not part of CopperSpice. Installing their program requires registration and this was never something we could remove for legal reasons. Please understand we are not unwilling to do this to be difficult or cause anyone problems. We want to remain respectful and professional towards other companies.

Based on your suggestion we have added the task of releasing the "UI Designer" to our road map. So this is a wonderful move for our users.

---------------
(1) Here are a few places you can download and install QtCreator. From our testing there is currently no cost involved and you do not need to install Qt, simply the IDE.

http://download.qt.io/snapshots/qtcreator/4.14/4.14.1/370/
https://chocolatey.org/packages/qtcreator (Windows)

(2) Another option is to use this github repository. There is a binary release file which may not require registration.

https://github.com/qt-creator/qt-creator
---------------

This is a great conversation and we are very happy everyone is sharing their ideas and preferences. We hope you can understand we want to do the right thing and sometimes it takes a few rounds.

[seasoned_geek]

You should be doing all of your development on Linux. Most Linux distros have QtCreator in their repos; no registration required.

[ Edit for content and clarity ]

QDevelop seems to have been pulled from SourceForge
Actually last bit of chatter about it seems to have been in 2006.
All links to source code have simply vanished. I didn't think anything disappeared from SourceForge.

Monkey Studio did have a designer.

Maybe the team, if they are still a team, could become interested in porting Monkey Studio to CopperSpice as the "official" IDE?

You always have the option of Eclipse it seems.

The entire qt plug-in was taken out and shot years ago, but someone ported Netbeans form dialog.

Just can't bring myself to use Eclipse. Not again....

Honestly I would like to see .UI files disappear. Notoriously problematic. XML was never a good choice for that. I've had to hand patch hundreds of UI files. Even today's designer still has the problem with "hidden layouts."

[ansel]

You should be doing all of your development on Linux. Most Linux distros have QtCreator in their repos; no registration required.

Please be aware this does not reflect the opinion or the philosophy of the CopperSpice team or any of its members. We encourage users to develop applications on any of our supported platforms.

[seasoned_geek]

You should be doing all of your development on Linux. Most Linux distros have QtCreator in their repos; no registration required.

[ Edit for content and clarity ]

QDevelop seems to have been pulled from SourceForge
Actually last bit of chatter about it seems to have been in 2006.
All links to source code have simply vanished. I didn't think anything disappeared from SourceForge.

Monkey Studio did have a designer.

Maybe the team, if they are still a team, could become interested in porting Monkey Studio to CopperSpice as the "official" IDE?

You always have the option of Eclipse it seems.

The entire qt plug-in was taken out and shot years ago, but someone ported Netbeans form dialog.

Just can't bring myself to use Eclipse. Not again....

Honestly I would like to see .UI files disappear. Notoriously problematic. XML was never a good choice for that. I've had to hand patch hundreds of UI files. Even today's designer still has the problem with "hidden layouts."

I don't know how it happened but the link for monkey studio got scrubbed.

[ Edited, links to other sites not preserved ]

[vuk]

This is not actually a backwards move. We did a bit more research and there are real problems which simply prevent us from distributing an application which is not part of CopperSpice. Installing their program requires registration and this was never something we could remove for legal reasons. Please understand we are not unwilling to do this to be difficult or cause anyone problems. We want to remain respectful and professional towards other companies.
. . .

Hello Barbara.
I just find out about your project and reading forum. I think it has a great potential to grow if you have a little bit of QTCreator adjusting.
Except for QT creator, there is no other pure C++ ide out there (VS studio code is not C++ for me). If you manage to make CS creator with minimal adjustments that QT is too a stubborn refusal to add like basic tab for code and similar, you can bring a lot of users and developers' attention to your project.

[barbara]

If you manage to make CS creator with minimal adjustments that QT is too a stubborn refusal to add like basic tab for code and similar, you can bring a lot of users and developers' attention to your project.

Thanks for your interest in the CopperSpice project. We hope you take a look at our CS libraries and if you have questions feel free ask here on the forum.

As mentioned in this thread the current license for QtCreator is GPL 3 and the CopperSpice libraries are LGPL 2.1 which presents some issues. It is perfectly legal to use CS to build QtCreator but whoever is working on this would need to be mindful. The last version of their Creator which was GPL 2 seems to be around version 3.5 and this might be a bit old. They changed the license when they moved to version 4 of the Creator.

We can take the Designer from Qt 5.6 and bring this forward with no license concerns and we have added this to our road map. Once we have CS Designer on github maybe the community can work with our team to create an IDE. We can even use parts of the old Creator 3.5 if that seems of value.

Is this something you would want to contribute to?

Barbara

[barbara]

We have some good news! The CopperSpice team decided it was time to develop CS Designer and we officially entered Beta status a few days ago. We expect to have a full release available by April 2022.

CS Designer is based on the Qt Designer 5.6 code base which allows us to maintain their LGPL 2.1 license. The CS Designer program is a stand alone application and will generate UI files which are compatible with both CopperSpice and Qt.

If anyone has any questions or is eager to test please let us know.

Barbara
Co Founder of CopperSpice

[badoink]

Sounds good. Any beta available?