Qt Co. today introduced a new development tool aimed at enabling programmers and designers to work together more effectively.

The Finnish firm, though not exactly a household name, has an outsized role in the software ecosystem. It maintains Qt, an open-source framework with roots dating back three decades that can be found in everything from enterprise applications such as Tableau to planes and ships. It’s mainly used for building the interface through which users interact with a system.

Qt Design Studio, as the new offering is called, tackles the collaboration challenges that often hamper interface development. The main issue is that designers and developers do most of their work separately using different tools. That barrier requires teams to spend a great deal of time on tasks such as sharing graphic assets and communicating change requests.

The service is aimed at making the process more efficient by bringing everything together in one environment. It lets designers import their media files from applications such as Photoshop and automatically convert them into interface elements powered by the Qt framework’s QLM language. From there, they can collaborate with members of the development team to build out the application front end.

The fact that the process is centralized removes the need for the usual back-and-forth exchanges involved in the task, according to Qt. Developers can see changes to interface elements as soon as they’re implemented by the design team and then make the code changes necessary to support the new layout.

The time savings that Qt Design Studio promises are particularly significant thanks to the highly iterative nature of interface development. An application typically goes through numerous revisions before its release, with each major change to the front end requiring coordination between the design and software departments.

To ease the task further, Qt has also equipped the tool with what it calls a “live preview” feature. The capability lets software teams to test an application on the specific hardware for which it’s intended, which provides the ability to assess how the interface works under real-world conditions.

Qt plans to make Qt Design Studio generally available this November.

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