How can I have Qt Creator to recognize my environment variables?
Apps launched from the dock or desktop or any GUI do not use bash. They are all children of the workspace (the loginwindow process).

To set the environment variables you need to edit ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist which is read when you login.
This is a text plist and you need to set a key element to the name of the environment variable it uses and the next string element to its value. See Apple's documentation for Setting environment variables for user processes

e.g. mine is for WAFDIR and PATH

&lt;!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"&gt;
&lt;plist version="1.0"&gt;
&lt;dict&gt;
  &lt;key&gt;WAFDIR&lt;/key&gt;
  &lt;string&gt;/Users/mark/src/third_party/git-svn/waf&lt;/string&gt;

  &lt;key&gt;PATH&lt;/key&gt;
  &lt;string&gt;/Users/mark/bin:/Users/mark/env/bin:/Users/mark/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/libexec/binutils:&lt;/string&gt;
&lt;/dict&gt;
&lt;/plist&gt;