Designing web interfaces is something that gives me grief. I’m not exactly the most elegant web designer in the world – interfaces that look like a bunch of stacked rectangles are fine as far as I’m concerned. They may not be pretty, but they are functional. Unfortunately, when doing $dayjob stuff, it has to be presentable to our customers, and they’re not always as technical as I am, so the interface needs to be ‘pretty’.

For the longest time, I’ve usually sketched a rough outline on a bit of paper, and then tried to implement the basics of it in HTML and CSS. I then hand it over to our actual web design guy to make sensible and prettier. Enter, stage left, QT designer. Yep, it’s a GUI UI designer, but it has drop-downs, text labels, text inputs, check boxes and radio buttons – which is exactly what a web browser has access to when rendering your bog standard HTML.  One print-screen later, and I have a nice mock-up of what I want the interface to look like, rather than a badly drawn version.  It’s also a heck of a lot faster to drag and drop UI elements than sit and churn out HTML code.