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();
}
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.