Debug JavaFx with a tool like FireBug - css

Is there a tool like FireBug (hover and get information about HTML and CSS) to see what is active in a JavaFX scene?

Try Scenic View – James_D
Scenic View is a JavaFX application designed to make it simple to
understand the current state of your application scenegraph, and to
also easily manipulate properties of the scenegraph without having to
keep editing your code. This lets you find bugs, and get things pixel
perfect without having to do the compile-check-compile dance.

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Treeview for FileSystem with checkboxes in qt

We need a tree view with File system and check boxes in QT. Is there any way to achieve that?
The tree we need would look something like below:
UPDATE:
I am able to achieve it with subclass of QFileSystemModel. Still have few challenges, but at least subclass is working. Below is the code if anyone needs it. Below is the link to the code -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qViZ3iEW2pV2th0jQhzneDL14SEhIgS0/view?usp=sharing
The pending work is to apply a wait cursor (or make treeview uneditable when the check/uncheck is taking place).
PS: It will take a lot of time if root node is checked.
Well, all of that can be achieved with minimal customizations of built-in classes, actually those checkboxes is almost the only thing that has to be done yourself.
QFileSystemModel already provides a proper model for displaying the current filesystem contents, it can be subclassed
As for QML, the best demo is already provided by Qt, check the File System Browser Example. This example uses some deprecaded Qt functionality, but still it shows the basic concept.
The modern techniqes can be also found in the answers to the following question: Qt File Browser based on QML
Hopefully, all that helps you, good luck!

How can I add custom graphics in Qt designer?

I'm comfortable with C++ but brand new to Qt. I apologize for my ignorance as I'm sure this is a very simple question. I'd like to make a custom clickable widget, basically a push button that is just a black square with Qt designer, but don't have any idea on where to start.
EDIT: after fumbling around I think I'm an epsilon closer.
I created a black_box.png file. In the resource browser I created a new resource and prefix, and added the black_box.png. Any advice from here?
You have a few options for what you want to achieve.
You can use custom painting to draw a new button that subclasses QPushButton, this is reasonably involved and provides a huge amount of flexibility to build it to your requirements.
You can use Qt's stylesheets mechanism to style it, you can get more information on it here: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet.html
Or you can set a QPixmap of your image to be a button icon, and size your button to match it, there's a good answer on how to do this on this question: How to set image on QPushButton?

Creating a home screen for my embedded board using Qt/Qt Quick

I am not an expert but I have been using Qt/QtEmbedded for sometime now, for SBC 6845. I have created a few applications and have successfully run them on my device.
Now I want all of those applications to appear on a home screen. I understand that using QML/Qt Quick this might be achieved, but I don't have any idea on how to proceed with it. I have gone through some links and tutorials but most of them show how to create buttons and all that with Qt Quick, but not much than that. I am yet to find some tutorial/docs which can point me how to proceed with all applications on my home-screen. I need some directions, any links, advice on docs/books is welcome.
[While cross-compiling the QtEmbedded 4.6.2 libraries for my SBC I encountered problems with enabling opengl support. And, I am unaware of the other methods for using QtQuick2 without opengl.
The applications (5-6 of them) are QWidgets and linking icons require to stay in the home screen. I want to keep them as simple as possible without any effects for the icons.
Plainly speaking, I am trying to create a bunch of icons displayed on the home screen linked to those applications. The applications if launched in windows style application, (or like a popup QDialog) will also serve my purpose.]
Thanks.
"I have gone through some links and tutorials but most of them show
how to create buttons and all that with Qt Quick, but not much than
that"
For this part of the question, I'd advise you to download QtCreator
and start playing with the demos (using more than just some buttons:
you have demos for ListViews, GridViews, Delegates, Animations,
Particles, QtQuick Layouts (Qt5.1 only), QtQuick Controls (Qt5.1
only).
There's also the rather complete :
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-labs/qt5-everywhere-demo
I'm completely unfamiliar with all the embedded/cross-compiling
aspects of your question.
About OpenGL/QtQuick2 : http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/30483
http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/17201
Also note that you can embed QtQuick2 scenes into a QWidget, but not
the other way around (no QtWidget inside the scenegraph).
So maybe the easiest/fastest way to go for you would be to stick with Qt4 or Qt5 declarative/QtQuick1 module (might be deprecated/removed starting with Qt 5.2). In this setup, there is no scenegraph/mandatory need for OpenGL. And you can embed QWidgets into your qml scene (no scenegraph: it uses the QGraphicsView backend) via QGraphicsProxyWidget.
You'd then have some GridView (you also could use some Grid with a Repeater) filled with models and delegates (= a delegate acts as a template item to be filled with the model).
Your delegates would have states/maybe Loader(s) (for on-demand loading) : icon state and when clicked, some maximized state containing a loader, loading your widget through QGraphicsProxyWidget.
You already have half of this presented in this example (a grid + 2 states : small icons grid and maximized view, you only need to implement the delegate/loading/model/QGraphicsProxyWidget things):
http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Implementing_parent_change_animation_with_QML

Qt and UI Skinning

I wanted to consult with the sages here regarding Qt and skinning, get your opinion and chart a path for my development. My requirements are as follows:
My Qt/C++ application (cross platform with Mac, Windows and Linux versions) needs to have modular skins.
A skin is defined as a set of one or more elements: - Window background texture - Look/feel of UI controls such as edit boxes, drop down, radio buttons, buttons etc. - Look/feel of window "caption", resize grips etc.
Skins will be installed with the application installer, allowing the user to choose which one he/she wants to use. Users should be able to change skins on the fly.
Can I go the QML route? should this be custom and based on simple resources which are built into the application? Any design advice will be appreciated.
Thanks.
If I understood you correctly then stylesheet is the best way forward. You can create stylesheets similar to CSS and then pass them as command line option to your application or load on invocation to style your application at runtime. That way you can create multiple stylesheets each having a different look and feel and allow user to load them at will. Since its CSS it doesn't need any new learning and you can keep all your styling outside your source code.
Here are a list of resources that can get you up and running quickly:
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2007/11/27/theming-qt-for-fun-and-profit/
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet.html
I haven't played with QML yet, but you could also create a custom QStyle implementation that supports your resource format. Note that you'd lose style sheet support if you went this route.
Changing window captions is a little trickier if you want portability.
QML, if I understand correctly, doesn't really skin the widgets, it mainly deals with GUI layout etc etc.
QStyle is used to change the looks. It is a bit low-level though, and requires programming, so if you want to load different user-created skins (from an XML or so) it might be tricky to support extensive skinning. Chaining colors and a few items are easy enough though. (There might be someone else who've done something you could re-use.. not sure.)
For modifying widgets, use QStyle::polish(). You could use that to change the background picture (if it's a top-level window, or of a certain class). There are numerous repaint method to change almost every part of every widget.
Store/load the style using QSettings, by reading and setting the desired Style just after QApplication but before your main window is constructed.

How to use "native" custom mouse cursors from within Flash apps?

The most common way of changing a cursor in Flash apps seems to be based on simply hiding the native OS cursor and displaying a graphic (drawn by the Flash Player) inside the Flash rectangle where the (hidden) cursor would be. This is what mx.managers.CursorManager does, for example. The reason why I find this approach unacceptable is that Flash Player isn't nearly fast enough at updating the cursor graphic, leading to some very visible lag in the cursor movement, which I find to be a pretty fundamental usability problem and annoyance, making the whole app seem slower than it really is.
On the other hand, I've noticed that the CSS cursor property implementation in browsers works like it should -- i.e. there's no visible lag in the cursor movement when using it to implement a custom mouse cursor.
So my question is: is there any way to use the CSS cursor property (or any other method that doesn't involve lagging, slow cursor movement) to change the cursor on top of a Flash rectangle?
I've already tried to change the cursor style property for a Flash element (or a Div wrapper around the Flash element) via JavaScript, but didn't seem to get it to work. Has anyone successfully done something like this?
Native cursors are available in Flash Player 10.2 beta. So you should give it a try! See: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2373
I don't believe there is any way for Flash to use custom system cursors. In my 6 years of being a Flash Developer I've never heard of such functionality or a hack.
I understand your complaints, I too have been frustrated with how laggy the display-update can be. Thinking about the solution to use CSS to set a cursor-style in the browser though is an interesting approach... It smells, but off the top you may be able to implement control over the CSS cursor attribute from Actionscript using ExternalInterface. That way you could presumably communicate back to the HTML container calling some Javascript to modify the HTML page CSS at runtime. Not 100% sure that will work, but it may be worth a try if you are desperate. Otherwise it's probably advisable to stick with CursorManager.
The CursorManager is it, but I haven't had any problems with being laggy.
If you haven't already seen it, check out Colin Moock's CustomMousePointer classes. He has a bunch of AS3 examples and sample code from his Essential AS3 book posted at http://www.moock.org/eas3/examples/. Scroll down to, or search for, the Custom Mouse Pointer link. It's under the Chapter 22 heading.
The code in these examples, incidentally, was originally intended for use by Flash developers, so you may be able to optimize some of them for Flex by using objects that aren't available in Flash's implementation of AS3.
I believe Flash Player 10 will natively let you select the ibar, drag hand, finger or normal cursors, but if you're in Flash 9 this isn't possible and I don't believe a CSS hack will work either.
My advice is - use the MOUSE_MOVE event to position a graphic and set the frame rate as high as possible (e.g. 50 frames per second).
You could in fact accomplish this by writing an ExternalInterface that calls javascript to update the Mousecursor. jQuery functionality would work well here and it is something im doing in my new portfolio site for buttons and various areas of the flash app.
The new portfolio is not up yet, but should be within the next week or two for those are curious it will be at http://chrismcintoshdesigns.com

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