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We have now released the 1.3.0 version of the Charts which brings Polar and Boxplot charts and some API enhancements. As usual the package is available in the Customer Portal.

Polar chart enables showing data in a circular graph. Polar charts support line, spline, area, and scatter series, and all axis types supported by those series.

Boxplot (also known as box-and-whiskers plot) is a convenient way of illustrating the minimum and maximum values (i.e. the range) with the quartiles. Boxplots have several use cases in statistical analysis e.g. in describing populations or analyzing stock exchange share prices.

With this version of charts we also now provide a Qt Quick 2 support which enables e.g. combining charts to applications created with Qt Quick Controls. However please note that Qt Charts still uses QGraphicsView framework under the hood even with Qt Quick 2. Therefore charts performance is usually better with Qt Quick 1 than with Qt Quick 2.

The Qt Charts 1.3.0 contains also several smaller improvements and fixes which are listed in the README file included in the source package. For an overview of the Charts functionality, please refer to the Charts product page.

We have made the Charts 1.3.0 release available through the Customer Portal. If you don’t have a commercial license for Qt, you can test out the Charts  by downloading a 30-day free evaluation. Let us know what you think!

October 7-9:  Berlin
November 6-8:  San Francisco

We are happy to announce that registration (Berlin only) AND Call for Papers (both locations) for Qt Developer Days 2013 is officially open.   Lock down your conference seat in Berlin and register before July 15th to get a free Raspberry Pi. That’s a sweet summer deal.

Registration for our San Francisco event in November will open soon. Stay tuned.

Qt Developer Days 2013 is the 10th annual Qt Developer Days event and together with KDAB and ICS, we are excited to mark a decades-worth of Qt geek fun, networking and top-notch technical presentations.

In order to make sure we have the best possible Qt Developer Days to-date with engaging tracks and sessions, we need your session proposals. If you have the expertise to share your Qt knowledge in any of these areas, please submit a proposal:

• Qt on Android
• Qt on iOS
• Qt on BlackBerry 10
• Qt on Sailfish
• Qt on WinRT
• Qt 3D and OpenGL
• Qt Quick / QML
• QtWebKit
• Qt and C++11
• Qt Platform Abstraction (Lighthouse)
• Qt product development stories (experiences, process, challenges, differentiation — open source and commercial projects are welcome)
• Qt on new hardware platforms (tutorials/introductions, improvements/developments, challenges)
• User Experience and Design Guidelines
• Development methodologies
• Current and possible future Qt components
• Qt tools and processes (tutorials/introductions, improvements/developments, tips and tricks, etc.)
• Quality Assurance (methods, tools, tutorials, experiences)
• Qt and the Open Source Community
• Other topics you think are of interest to Qt developers

Learn more about the requirements and submit your proposal here.

This year, we are mixing it up a little bit and introducing a 2-day “Starter Edition” sub-event to Qt Developer Days in Berlin. The Qt Developer Days Starter Edition will run adjacent to the main event targeted at newcomers to Qt who are looking to learn the basics about developing with Qt, learn why to use Qt for application development and get some hand-holding on Qt development best practices. More information on the details of the Starter Edition in Berlin coming soon.

Registration specifically for the Qt Developers Days Starter Edition will open soon. Registration for main Qt Developer Days event in Berlin is now open.

Learn more at www.qtdeveloperdays.com.

We have launched Qt Insights, a Qt market research study that will help us learn more about Qt usage in the big world and also help new audiences learn about Qt.

Digia, BlackBerry, Basyskom, ICS and KDAB have come together to sponsor the Qt Insights Market Research Study. Qt Insights will help new audiences learn about Qt through a dialog with Qt users together with a media awareness campaign.

We need your help!

Complete the 10-minute developer survey and enter into a draw to win one of three Blackberry Z10 smartphones plus other prizes courtesy of Digia will be available throughout the campaign.
Take the survey at http://bit.ly/QtInsightsSurvey. Findings will be shared at www.qtinsights.com later in the summer.

Six months ago we laid out Digia’s Qt strategy at Qt Developer Days 2012 and since then we have been working together with the community to achieve our goals of increasing the use of Qt and expanding business opportunities for all members of the Qt ecosystem and Digia.

I wanted to explain a bit more in detail via this blog post how Digia plans to keep Qt in the lead position, thriving and continuously evolving as well as give a state of the union as we mark our 6-month milestone.

2017 Goals

First, let’s quickly re-cap what we have set as our goals for the next few years.

• #1 in multi-platform support
• #1 in developer experience
• #1 in creating great user experiences
• Strong value-generating ecosystem
• Dual licensing model
• Open business architecture

We have made great progress in many of these already in the past few months, so I think we are definitely in the right track to reach these together.

#1 in Multi-Platform Support

Qt is by nature a cross-platform development framework, which has supported a large number of desktop, embedded and mobile platforms. In the past few months, we have been actively working on introducing support for Android and iOS as well as improving the experience on the desktop and embedded platforms. With the soon–to-be released Qt 5.1 we will already be able to provide solid technology previews for both Android and iOS, which we expect to be complete for Qt 5.2 coming out before the end of this year. We are also working with the WinRT port of Qt to be available soon after Android and iOS. With the introduction of support in Qt 5.1 for the leading mobile platforms, Qt jumps to the next phase of being a platform agnostic world-class and all-around cross-platform software development framework.

#1 in Developer Experience

We have started a few projects to make developers’ encounters with Qt easy and effortless. In Qt 5.0 we tightly coupled Qt Creator and other tools into the same Qt package together with the libraries making it possible to get everything they need to start developing with Qt all in one place. It is still possible to develop for Qt with other IDEs than Qt Creator – for example with Visual Studio or XCode. We have also been working with the online installers for Qt 5, which will be available soon and further improve the experience of developing with Qt. We are also investing heavily into tooling. Focusing on, for example, the new Qt Quick Designer, which was first released with Qt Creator 2.7, and the new Qt Quick Controls of which the first set will come in Qt 5.1.

#1 in Creating a Great User Experience

Qt is known for its ability to create amazing user experiences.  We are working hard to continue Qt’s position as the leading software development framework that enables the creation of stunning UIs with an unbeatable graphics performance. The new graphics pipeline of Qt 5 is one of the cornerstones to reach this goal.  Qt Quick 2 offers a GL-based scene graph, a particle system and a collection of shader effects for fun and cool animations, amongst other things, as well as Qt Multimedia and Qt Graphical Effects that lets the developer bring motion and sound to life within their application.  We will continue to improve these capabilities and make it even easier to build stunning applications with Qt.

Strong Value Generating Ecosystem

In addition to actively working with the developer community through the Qt Project, we are making good progress with our Digia Qt Partner Program with the first partners already signed on and many more to be enrolled soon. We are actively working with members of the Qt community to make sure that valuable Qt events and activities are possible.

This year, the Qt Contributors Summit and KDE Akademy will be held jointly where two strong communities can leverage from each other’s expertise. Digia is a platinum sponsor at this year’s combined Qt Contributor Summit and KDE Akademy. Following last year’s successful Qt Developer Days in Berlin and California, Digia will again join forces with KDAB and ICS to put Qt Developer Days 2013. Lastly, this June, Digia together with top sponsors and active Qt community participants BlackBerry and Jolla, will host the Qt Developer Day China in Beijing (June 6) to cater to our growing Qt ecosystem in China.  We believe that by working together in the ecosystem we can jointly take Qt forward at an unbeatable speed and benefit from the growing user base of developers making Qt-based solutions in over 70 different industries including free software.

Dual Licensing Model

We believe that the dual licensing model is crucially important for the whole Qt ecosystem to thrive, and that it is the best way to further develop Qt. The full development of Qt and making it the leading cross-platform application development framework is at the cornerstone of Digia’s strategy. This means that we want all developers, organizations, companies around the world regardless of industry, business model, device types etc., to use Qt to further their own development goals and business strategies.

In order to keep Qt in the lead allowing innovation into our development, it is important that Qt is available for commercial users and the open source community and provide the functionality that meet the varying needs of both. We believe in the power of open-source development in fostering innovation and value very much all the things we do together with the Qt community via the Qt Project. The dual licensing model serves two purposes in driving Qt forward:

• Commercial licensing secures future investments into Qt R&D with the financial stability needed to keep the Digia Qt engineering teams producing invaluable code development and contributions. Revenue generated from the commercial license sales also enables the Qt Project to charge forward securing, for example, the infrastructure, repositories and qt-project.org servers and development to be a community arena for Qt development where all can participate and contribute.
• Qt open-source development provides an incomparable vehicle to make Qt available everywhere for everybody increasing the Qt user base and promoting adoption of the technology.

Both of the above models work hand-in-hand; without one our goals of bringing Qt to all and making it the world’s leading cross-platform development framework are not fully possible. Our new mobile ports of Qt for Android, and iOS as well as the upcoming WinRT port are fully developed in the open, a very strong proof point that we really do believe in dual licensing also in the future.

Open Business Architecture

Tightly related with the strong value generating ecosystem is open business architecture – a new element in the Qt ecosystem. We believe that enabling more business opportunities for everybody via Qt will be beneficial for the entire ecosystem.  Open business architecture is a principle that defines the rules for an equal playing ground where everybody is invited to participate. At this point, we see this as a principle, but later on we hopefully are able to develop the whole business architecture forward in such way – and enable more business for everybody.

With an open and thriving Qt ecosystem, we believe that Digia and other players in the community can provide value-adding products for functionality, tools and services. We believe that having such additional components available not only provides more business opportunities for all interested companies, but also makes Qt stronger. The more there are ready-made solutions available to meet the needs and challenges in various industries and use cases, the more value Qt offers our users.

Adding Value

Digia is seeking to create added value in mainly the following areas:

•    Value-adding functionality especially for enterprise users and in the embedded space
•    Improved tools providing a shortened time-to-market and cost savings for companies using Qt
•    Cloud-based services than can be used in conjunction with solutions built with Qt
•    Support and services for development with Qt

Some examples of these are already available; for example, the Charts library and the improved Visual Studio Add-In, as well as our support and services offering. We are working on a new cloud-based backend for Qt applications called Enginio, which was first presented at the Qt Developer Days last year. We are very close to launching the public technology preview, so stay tuned for it.

Especially for our enterprise and embedded customers, we have been working with additional tools that can be plugged into the Qt Creator IDE to make developing with Qt even more efficient, as well as to meet the growing demands of our customers and companies who have chosen Qt as their strategic development choice and who require a full commitment from Digia to succeed in their industry.   We believe that it is possible to provide these refinements of Qt for many different industries, and are aiming to develop Qt and our tooling offering further to allow also other members of the Qt community to offer these as part of the open business architecture.

All in all, I am very happy with the progress we have made towards the goals we set for Qt last year. I am extremely pleased that we have been able to work towards these with so many great partners, customers and community members that form the Qt ecosystem. I believe that by continuing this together we will be able to take Qt forth at record pace and truly make it the number #1 choice for cross-platform application and UI development.

We would love to hear from you, so please drop us a note in the comments below. Happy Qt development!

Two weeks ago we initiated the Qt 5.1 cycle by merging our development code base into the stable branch. Since then, the release team has been working on stabilizing the branch and we now have the first set of Qt 5.1 packages available. They are available from the new download.qt-project.org area for the open source version and in your customer portal for commercial users). The packages are source only and mainly for people already used to developing with Qt. Unless you feel comfortable compiling Qt on your own, you might want to wait for the beta which will come out within the next few weeks.

A lot has happened since the Qt 5.0 release in December, and I am truly impressed by the amount of new things that we managed to get done for this alpha release. Let’s have a short look at the most important new features.

Android & iOS

To start with, we have added preliminary support for Android and iOS to Qt 5.1. This release is fully usable on both platforms and you can begin to develop for both OSs immediately. All of qtbase (Qt Core, Gui, Network etc.) is implemented. Qt Quick works very nicely on Android and most sensors are supported. There are, however, certain limitations. Some parts of Multimedia are not fully implemented and Qt Quick is not yet working on iOS. Tooling is also still a work in progress, and not everything can be done from within Qt Creator yet, but many things are already  working nicely and smoothly.  As announced last year, full Android and iOS support will come with Qt 5.2, but Qt 5.1 provides a solid base for developers to create full applications for these two platforms.

Introduction of Qt Quick Controls

Then, we finally have cross-platform controls for Qt Quick. The modules ((QtQuick Controls (formerly known as Desktop Components)and Qt Quick Layouts) offer ready- available controls and layouts you can use to build your user interface, starting from buttons, layouts, over menu and toolbars to dialogs and high-level navigational controls. Of course, they have the look and feel of native widgets of the underlying platforms. They are currently implemented for the desktop operating systems, support for touch-based platforms will get added for Qt 5.2.

Add-ons

A couple of new modules got added as well. First of all, we brought back Qt Sensors as an add-on. The module is currently supported on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Mer (Sailfish). A module for controlling serial ports (Qt SerialPort) has also been added, and we have an X11 specific add-on (Qt X11Extras).

Finally, we have added many other smaller features to the existing modules. For more details, please have a look at the Qt 5.1 feature list.

From now, we will start work on Qt 5.1 beta, which I  expect to be released a few weeks from now. Following that, Qt 5.1 final can be expected to come before the beginning of summer. Let us know what you think of our Qt 5.1 alpha. Enjoy!

We are happy to announce that the 10th annual Qt Developer Days, the premier Qt event of the year, is booked and confirmed this autumn in Berlin and Silicon Valley. Save the dates!

• Berlin, Germany (Café Moskau and Umspannwerk Alexanderplatz): October 7-9
• San Francisco, CA (The San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront): November 6-8

Just like in 2012, Digia will be a co-host together with KDAB and ICS for the Berlin and Silicon Valley events respectively. Qt Developer Days 2012 was a fantastic event where Qt got a mega boost from the very-well received keynote by Digia SVP, Tommi Laitinen and also from the hundreds of enthusiastic Qt fans on site. It was an amazing opportunity to hear from the Qt experts first hand, network with new and veteran Qt groupies and learn about the bright future ahead for the best cross-platform development framework.

Last year’s event would not have been possible without the planning and execution by KDAB and ICS. They did an awesome job and brought the community together to give a positive signal that Qt was alive and kicking.

In case you missed last year’s event or you are just feeling nostalgic, have a look at the following videos courtesy of KDAB and ICS.

Qt Developer Days 2012 Berlin

 Qt Developer Days 2012 North America

Now, as we are a quarter of the way through 2013, we are excited that this year will mark a decade of Qt Developer Days. Time flies while having fun. Mark your calendars and make all efforts possible to join us and the army of Qt developers that will gather at both events. These are the events to be at to hear from our Qt experts on the latest developments on Qt and upcoming ports, the roadmap, best practiceson fascinating features and functions and lastly the best places to be at to get your jabber on and network with the Qt community.

We will soon post a call for papers, so stay tuned! http://www.qtdeveloperdays.com.

Anybody been to all 9 developer days? Who is shooting for 10? See you there!

The Qt Charts 1.2.1 is a patch-level release containing 9 fixes which are listed in the README file included in the source package. We are currently working on the next release, which brings Polar and Box Plot charts and some API enhancements suggested by charts users.

For an overview of the Charts functionality, please refer to the Charts product page and the latest new features are listed in the 1.2.0 release announcement.

We have made the Charts 1.2.1 release available to commercial Qt licensees through the Qt Customer Portal. The release team is working on a new SDK and therefore the Charts is not yet available through there yet. Stay tuned.

If you don’t have a commercial license for Qt, you can test out the Charts 1.2.1 by downloading a 30-day free evaluation. Let us know what you think!

We are very excited to be able to bring Qt to a new platform. Qt for iOS is planned to be a supported part of Qt 5.2, scheduled for release late 2013. The scope of that release is not completely determined: available resources, platform/app store restrictions and Qt legacy set constraints on the project. This blog outlines the current plan.

Qt 5.1 will contain a preview – which was in fact merged last Friday. It’s also possible to take a look today by checking out the Qt source code. See “Getting Started” for detailed instructions below.

Development and Deployment
Development and especially deployment is done using Xcode. The supported workflow is to maintain a .pro file based project, export it to Xcode (and re-export when the project setup changes), and then build and deploy using Xcode. Source code editing can as usual be done in any editor.

Qt 5 Architecture
Understanding the level of support various Qt modules will get, requires a brief detour into Qt 5 architecture. With Qt 5 there is now a common API that all platforms implement (the Qt platform abstraction – QPA). Most of the Qt for iOS project work will happen here, and this is the code base the team will support. The QPA layer powers both widgets and QML (1 and 2).

Styling
The Qt Mac style uses the HITheme API provided by OS X to draw native-looking UI elements. There is no such API on iOS, which means creating a QiOSStyle similar to QMacStyle is not possible. Cross-platform styles such as the new Fusion style will however be available. Future styling efforts will focus on controls for Qt Quick 2.

Qt Quick 2: JavaScript engines and JIT
Qt Quick 2 uses the V8 javascript engine, which cannot be deployed on iOS due to policy and technical limitations related to V8′s use of a just-in-time compiler. This means no Qt Quick 2 on iOS for the time being. We are aware of the problem and are working on a solution.

What works today

• Widgets
• Graphics View
• Qt Quick 1

• OpenGL
• Touch events
• Orientation events
• ++

Qt5 Cinematic Experience by QUIt Coding, ported to Qt Quick 1 and running on an iPad

Getting started

1. Homework: Setup Xcode for development (acquire certificates, configure devices). Test-deploy one of the standard Xcode app templates. Make sure you have Git installed.
2. Clone qtbase
   git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qtbase.git qtbase-ios
cd qtbase-ios/
git checkout dev
   [Optional: git checkout ios for the development branch]
3. Build QtBase for either device or simulator. Note that unlike Qt 4, Qt 5 does not support multi-architecture builds.
   /configure -xplatform unsupported/macx-ios-clang -developer-build -nomake examples -nomake tests -release [-sdk iphonesimulator]
make
4. Get the Simple Demo:
   git clone git://github.com/msorvig/qt-ios-demo.git
cd qt-ios-demo
../qtbase-ios/bin/qmake
open qt-ios-demo.xcodeproj

Update: Building Qt Quick 1
You need the full Qt source code, see Building Qt 5 from Git. Then build the QtScript and QtQuick1 modules:

cd qtscript; ../qtbase/bin/qmake; make; cd ..
cd qtquick1; ../qtbase/bin/qmake; make; cd ..


Christmas is getting close, and it’s about time to unwrap one of the presents. You can get it at qt-project.org/downloads and learn more about about it via Qt 5.0 page on qt-project.org. For those of you that are commercial customers, simply visit your download area. If you are interested in evaluating the commercial version, please visit qt.digia.com/qt5.

So yes, it has finally happened:

Let’s unwrap it a bit, and have a look at what’s inside.

Features

Qt 5.0 is a major overhaul over the Qt 4.x series that have been around since 2005. We have invested lots of time and effort to make Qt fit for the future.

Qt 5.0 comes as a full SDK package with binaries for Linux (64 and 32 bit), Mac OS X (10.7 and 10.8) and Windows. This implies that in addition to the Qt 5 frameworks, the packages come with Qt Creator 2.6, examples and full documentation.

The video below should give a good first impression of many of the new features in Qt 5.0, as well as its capabilities:

The whole video is actually a screen capture of a Qt 5 based application using Qt Quick, OpenGL and WebKit.

For those of you who want to see it in real, running smoothly on your desktop or device, get Qt 5, then download the demo from qt.gitorious.org/qt-labs/qt5-launch-demo, open the project in Qt Creator, build it and enjoy!

The blog posts about the alpha, betas (beta1 and beta2) and release candidates (RC1 and RC2) contain a lot of additional details on the features that got added with Qt 5, and if you’re hungry for more details I can recommend reading up on these posts again. The roadmap presentation I gave at the Qt Developer Days this year also contains some more details.

Compatibility

But we haven’t forgotten where we’re coming from. Qt 5 is the successor to Qt 4, and we have done our utmost to keep Qt 5 as compatible with Qt 4.x as possible.

While we have cleaned up many things in our internal architecture and made Qt more modular, leaner and faster, we have managed to keep application compatibility in a way that most applications will work with very few changes and a simple recompile on Qt 5.

Of course, this also implies that Qt Widgets are fully supported and an essential part of Qt 5.

Qt Creator, being the biggest application we develop inside the Qt Project, is a prime example that shows this. A couple of weeks ago, we released Qt Creator 2.6 for use with Qt 4.8. The Qt 5 packages ship with Qt Creator 2.6.1 (which apart from bug fixes contains the same code base), but compiled against Qt 5.

Known issues, reporting bugs and contributing

As with every release, also this one has a few issues left that we know about. If you encounter a problem, please check the known issues page first, where you can find solutions and workarounds for common problems.

If you find any other bug in Qt 5, please help us to improve the product in future releases by reporting it to bugreports.qt-project.org. Ideas for or contributions of new features are also welcome. Simply check out qt-project.org/contribute for details.

The road ahead

There are a few things we’re still working on for the 5.0 series. We have bugs that we want to fix. We currently do not have binary packages for MinGW (as WebKit doesn’t yet work with it yet) and MSVC 2012 (you’ll need to compile from source), and we’ll work on delivering these as soon as possible. The current plan is to have a first patch level release, 5.0.1, some time before the end of January.

We’ll then be aiming for a Qt 5.1 release some time in Spring 2013, where we’ll mainly focus on stability and bringing modules such as Qt 3D and Qt Sensors into the Qt 5 base distribution. We also hope to be able to show some preview releases of the Qt ports for Android and iOS within the same time frame.

From there on, we will move over to a fully time based release schedule with feature releases twice a year.

Thanks

Finally, there should be some time to thank all the people that helped make the release happen.

A total of 427 people have contributed changes to the code base. Here are the pictures of some of them:

Many more have helped by reporting bugs, discussing with us, giving feedback, or simply by supporting the people that have been working on Qt 5.0.

Everybody at Digia has been working extremely hard the last couple of months trying to get the release together. We managed to completely restructure the documentation after the 2nd beta. People have been doing an amazing amount of testing and bug fixing. Pulling it all together was a lot harder then we all expected, but we managed to get the packages into shape in the end.

KDAB has been contributing a lot with features, bug fixes and reports. They did special Qt 5 bug fixing days. Many other people inside the community have worked equally hard.

This shows that a little more then one year after it’s launch, the Qt Project has turned into a great and fantastic community.

I’d like to thank each and every one of you. You all helped making this release happen.

Enjoy your Christmas holidays and I wish us all a happy and successful new year!