I&#39;m spending these holidays learning to write Qt applications. I was reading about Qt Designer just a few hours ago, which made me wonder : what do people writing real world applications in Qt use to design their GUIs? In fact, how do people design GUIs in general?

I, for one, found that writing the code by hand was conceptually simpler than using Qt Designer, although for complex GUIs Designer might make sense. Large GUIs might be possible using Designer, but with time they might become very difficult to manage as complexity increases (this is just my opinion). I also downloaded the AmaroK source code to take a peek at what those guys were doing, and found many calls to addWidget() and friends, but none of those XML files created by Designer (aside: AmaroK has to be my favorite application ever on any platform).

What, then, is the &quot;right&quot; way to create a GUI? Designer or code? Let us, for this discussion, consider the following types of GUIs :

1. Simple dialogs that just need to take input, show some result and exit. Let&#39;s assume an application that takes a YouTube URL and downloads the video to the user&#39;s hard disk. The sort of applications a newbie is likely to start out with.
2. Intermediate level GUIs like, say, a sticky notes editor with a few toolbar/menu items. Let&#39;s take xPad for example (http://getxpad.com/). I&#39;d say most applications falling in the category of &quot;utilities&quot;.
3. Very complex GUIs, like AmaroK or OpenOffice. You know &#39;em when you see &#39;em because they make your eyes bleed.

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Hand Coded GUI Versus Qt Designer GUI