Qt Archive

Earlier this week, Qt 6.7 was released with a whole slew of new features and improvements. Reading through the various highlights, there’s further improvements to Qt Graphs, first released with Qt 6.6 and still under active development, better SVG support, variable fonts and icon font support, and much more. There’s also a variety of new examples and demo applications, and of course, Qt 6.7 supports all the latest operating system releases. One feature that truly stood out to me as something that I’m assuming will make Qt developers happy is improved support for embedding native controls into Qt applications. On both desktop and mobile platforms, applications often need to combine UI elements from different technologies and frameworks. Qt uses and integrates tightly with the native technologies on each platform to create basic UI elements such as windows, and it has for a long time been possible to use UI elements from other frameworks within a Qt Widgets application. With Qt 6.7, we are now adding support for embedding native windows into a Qt Quick scene as well. This allows use of native controls such as AppKit’s MapView or a Windows media player inside a Qt Quick UI, with correct positioning and stacking. By layering windows, Qt Quick UI elements can be overlaid on top of the native components as well. ↫ Volker Hilsheimer Alongside Qt 6.7, Qt Creator 13 has also been released, which comes with its own set of improvements and new features.

Today marks the 6th time we are releasing new functionality in the Qt 6 series, with small and large additions that make both UI and backend development more productive and fun. Several of the new features come as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything in tip-top shape for the next LTS release! Lots of new goodies for Qt developers.

At the time the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded, Qt was developed by Trolltech–the company that originally developed the framework. The Foundation has supported Qt through its transitions, first to Nokia, then to Digia, and finally to The Qt Company. It has the right to release Qt, if necessary to ensure that Qt remains open source. This remarkable legal guarantee protects the free software community and creates trust among developers, contributors, and customers. This special deal is well-known, but it’s also kind of unique. It’s great that KDE has such a solid guarantee in its back pocket in case of an emergency.

Key changes in Qt 6.0 include: • Leveraging C++17• Next generation QML• New graphics architecture• Unified 2D and 3D for Qt Quick• CMake build system (with qmake still supported for applications)• Multiple improvements throughout A big release – but I’m not a programmer so I won’t pretend to try and understand all of this.

As the last release of the Qt 5 series, we wanted to make sure that Qt 5.15 is a great release that you can easily upgrade to with your ongoing projects. It is, as always, fully backward-compatible with previous Qt 5 releases. A large amount of work has gone into bug fixes, and Qt 5.15 is the best and most stable release we’ve done in the Qt 5 series. Qt 6 is expected before the end of the year.

There’s a storm brewing in the world of Qt and KDE, as the parent company of Qt, The Qt Company, is contemplating restricting new Qt releases to paying customers (i.e., not releasing them as open source) for twelve months. This obviously affects the KDE project considerably, who have been negotiating with The Qt Company for years now. An announcement made by The Qt Company in January derailed said negotiations, however. As KDE’s Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer explains: They announced that LTS releases of Qt will only be available for paid license holders. It is still unclear what this implies for contributions to Qt and for the sharing of security fixes between the various parties (including The Qt Company, the many Qt experts contributing, the KDE community, and Linux distributions). It seemed the two parties were working on a path forward acceptable to all parties involved, but then came the announcement earlier today that The Qt Company was contemplating restricting all releases to paid customers for twelve months. It seems bad blood has been brewing for a while, as Schmidt-Wischhöfer states: The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt instead. All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. We will continue to work on a contract update that helps all sides. But even if these negotiations were to be unilaterally stopped by The Qt Company, Qt will stay Open Source, and KDE will be able to use it. I am also absolutely sure that the Qt + KDE communities will continue cooperation on new features, bug fixes, and security fixes, even should The Qt Company decide to forgo the benefits of cooperation. Luckily for the future of KDE and Qt, there is an agreement in place between KDE and The Qt Company that states that “ should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses.” This is a serious issue that I hope can be resolved, as nobody will benefit from a serious rift between The Qt Company and the KDE project.

7 years ago, Qt 5 was released. Since then, a lot of things have changed in the world around us, and it is now time to define a vision for a new major version. This blog post captures the most important points that can and should define Qt 6.

The blog post about the release has more information.

Qt 5.1 has been released. It brings several enhancements, Qt Quick Controls, Qt Sensors, a much better C++11, Wayland and OpenGL support, and the development of Android and iOS applications is very usable for a large number of use cases. In related news, the LXDE desktop prepares the change to Qt.

"For this preliminary release, we are focusing on the developer experience, working to enable Qt developers to easily run and test their applications on Android devices. While there's nothing preventing you from deploying your app to an app store with Qt 5.1, we're recommending that people wait until Qt 5.2 before they do that, as we'd like to put some more work into improving that experience: making more options for how your app is deployed, adding more polish in general, and adding more support for Android APIs, both by allowing you to extend your app with Java code or by mapping them in C++ APIs, whichever makes the most sense."

Digia, Qt's new owner, has announced the release of version 5 of the framework. "Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions."

Digia has announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Digia has sent a letter to the KDE team that it intends to pretty much continue what Trolltech and Nokia built up, so not a whole lot ought to change for KDE - luckily.