Splash Screens

Many applications present a splash screen at startup. Some developers use a splash screen to disguise a slow startup, while others do it to satisfy their marketing departments. Adding a splash screen to Qt applications is very easy using the QSplashScreen class.

The QSplashScreen class shows an image before the application proper has started. It can also draw a message on the image, to inform the user about the progress of the application's initialization process. Typically, the splash screen code is located in main(), before the call to QApplication::exec().

Below is an example main() function that uses QSplashScreen to present a splash screen in an application that loads modules and establishes network connections at startup.

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { QApplication app(argc, argv); QSplashScreen *splash = new QSplashScreen(QPixmap::fromMimeSource("splash.png")); splash->show(); splash->message(QObject::tr("Setting up the main window..."), Qt::AlignRight | Qt::AlignTop, Qt::white); MainWindow mainWin; app.setMainWidget(&mainWin); splash->message(QObject::tr("Loading modules..."), Qt::AlignRight | Qt::AlignTop, Qt::white); loadModules(); splash->message(QObject::tr("Establishing connections..."), Qt::AlignRight | Qt::AlignTop, Qt::white); establishConnections(); mainWin.show(); splash->finish(&mainWin); delete splash; return app.exec(); }

Figure 3.18. A QSplashScreen widget

We have now completed the Spreadsheet application's user interface. In the next chapter, we will complete the application by implementing the core spreadsheet functionality.