Discovering the Animation Framework

Your application works like a charm. It is now time to look at how we can make it jump and move, or, in a word, live. The Qt Animation Framework can be used to create and start animations of Qt properties. The property value will be smoothly interpolated by an internal global timer handle by Qt. You can animate anything as long as it is a Qt property. You can even create a property for your own object using Q_PROPERTY. If you forgot about Q_PROPERTY, please refer to Chapter 7, Third-Party Libraries Without a Headache.

Three main classes are provided to build animations:

• QPropertyAnimation: This class animates one Qt property animation

• QParallelAnimationGroup: This class animates multiple animations in parallel (all the animations start together)

• QSequentialAnimationGroup: This class animates multiple animations in sequence (the animations run one by one in a defined order)

All those classes inherit QAbstractAnimation. Here is a diagram from the official Qt...