Qt Designer for PyQt on OSX 10.6

Question

I liked the Qt Designer on Windows so much for creating GUIs for Python applications (using PyQt4) that I went to and tried to install it on my Mac (under OSX 10.6.6).

At this point, I successfully installed SIP, Qt4, and PyQt4.

PyQt binary installers (for Windows) include a version of Qt Designer that works with PyQt. OSX does not have a binary installer, just a source. So there is no Qt Designer.

The Qt site offers Qt Creator as a download, but as far as I can tell, it requires you to write code in C / C ++.

Is there a way to get Qt Creator to work with PyQt? Or is there another graphic designer for PyQt that works on a Mac?

Thanks! -Wesley

Answer 1

If you installed Qt4, you have Qt Designer. If you used the installer with qt.nokia.com, it should be in / Developer / Applications / Qt.

The Qt developer itself works great with PyQt. The Qt designer simply spills out XML describing the structure of the user interface. If you used standard Qt with C ++, you need to run the uic tool to create C ++ from .ui files. Similarly, with PyQt4, you must run pyuic4 in the generated .ui file to create a python source from it.

If you are looking for a complete IDE solution that automatically handles all this with PyQt, I don’t know about the existence of one of them. I just have a build_helper.py script that processes all my .ui files and puts them in the appropriate place in the python package that I am developing. I run the build assistant script before running the main program to make sure that the generated code is updated.

All my .ui files are in the ui subfolder at the root of the project. Then the script creates a python source and puts it in 'myapp / ui / generated'.

For example:

 import os.path from PyQt4 import uic generated_ui_output = 'myapp/ui/generated' def process_ui_files(): ui_files = (glob.glob('ui/*.ui'), glob.glob('ui/Dialogs/*.ui'), glob.glob('ui/Widgets/*.ui'))) for f in ui_files: out_filename = ( os.path.join( generated_ui_output, os.path.splitext( os.path.basename(f))[0].replace(' ', '')+'.py') ) out_file = open(out_filename, 'w') uic.compileUi(f, out_file) out_file.close() if __name__ == '__main__': process_ui_files() 

I also have several other functions to run pyrcc4 to compile resources and pylupdate4 and lrelease to generate translations.