5.4. Summary

This chapter covered many things. You learned how to create a menubar, toolbars, and a statusbar. You learned about various types of content areas, how to program simple drag-and-drop, how to give users help on your application, and how to use standard dialog boxes.

The menubar, toolbars, and the statusbar look and functionality is provided—and constrained—by the KDE widgets KMenuBar, KToolBar, and KStatusBar. Using these will automatically give you much of the KDE look and feel.

You can give help at three levels. The simplest, shortest messages come from ToolTips or statusbar messages. Longer descriptions (about three paragraphs at most) come from What's This? help. These are useful for explaining complicated widgets or dialog boxes. And, when all else fails, the user can read the full program documentation.

KDE and Qt provide dialog boxes for common tasks, such as requesting a filename, a font, a color, and displaying messages. Using these dialog boxes is not only easier than writing your own, it makes the method of answering these common questions the same in your application as in others.