Once upon a time, back in the Qt 4 and QtMobility days, there used to be a Location API. Unfortunately, during the transition to Qt 5, this API never managed to get a complete port. Qt Mobility location code was tightly bound to QML1, while Qt 5 introduced QML 2. However if you looked carefully, you may have detected that some QML 2 work had already been done for Qt 5.0. More attention and love was required though. With Qt 5.2 Qt Positioning was released, which was a subset of the Qt 4 Location API offering. It focused on providing the means to determine the geographic position.
Now, with Qt 5.5 the remaining Location APIs are back as a Technology Preview. The main differences between the initial Qt 5.0 work and the current state are the removal of the Qt3D dependencies, updating the map rendering logic and fixing the mouse/touch handling.
The heart of every location offering is accessing and presenting map data. Qt Location builds on top of the Qt Positioning offering and uses Mercator projections for tile -maps. They are rendered using Qt Quick Scene Graph with tiles being simple texture nodes. Users can interact with maps using gestures, insert markers or draw simple geometric objects like rectangles & circles. There are currently three plug-ins providing map data:
In addition, Qt Location provides utilities to find a geographic coordinate based on a street address (geocoding) and navigation routes between two locations. It includes simple driving and walking directions. Everything is exposed with nice and familiar model types in QML, for example GeocodeModel and RouteModel. The obtained navigation data can be presented on the map using the Route type and follows the model-view-delegate pattern. The route instructions can be extracted via the RouteManeuver type. Currently, the HERE and OpenStreetMap plug-in provide support for geocoding and navigation.
Last but not least, there is the Places sub module. It not only provides the means to discover categorized places of interests (POIs) but also presents place details like reviews and associated images. The Places API centers around several QML models with the main two being CategoryModel and PleaseSearchModel. Other features such as search suggestions and reviews are implemented in similar ways. Currently POI functionality is provided by the OpenStreetMap and HERE plug-in.
In summary, QtLocation is back in Qt 5.5. Please checkout our documentation and we are looking forward to your feedback !
Why would we announce one speaker when we could announce 50 at once? We are beyond thrilled to share our lineup for Qt World Summit 2015 with you.
We also have the preliminary agenda launched for you to take a look at. Make sure to check back often — we’re adding new sessions. Visit the QtWS15 website to take a closer look at the thought-provoking content we’ll be sharing with you in October.
2015 Tracks:
Tech Strategy — focused sessions for decision makers / strategists AND Technical — a crowd-pleaser every year
Latest Qt Offering
Device Creation
Introductory Qt
Qt in Use
Qt in Automotive
Developer Unconference
We know you don’t want to miss QtWS15. The question is, do you want to save €50 on your pass? In celebration of launching our agenda and announcing 50 speakers, we are offering you a 24-hour flash sale. Register for QtWS15 with the code “AGENDA” to get €50 off your registration by Friday, July 17th, 5 pm CET / 11 am EDT / 8 am PDT .
Need help convincing your manager? Download the justification e-mail, tailor it to fit your situation, then send it on for approval.
Thinking about becoming a Qt World Summit sponsor? Please contact us.
If you’ve been putting off buying your ticket to Qt World Summit 2015, you should definitely stop procrastinating. You have just a few hours left to purchase early bird tickets at the discounted rate (July 13, 11:59pm CET).
Qt World Summit 2015 runs from October 5-7 and with all of the amazing speakers and killer demos we’re lining up, it’s shaping up to be one heck of a Qt-atastic time. You won’t want to miss it.
Wondering what’s happening as the preparation for Qt World Summit continues? Here’s a quick rundown:
The Program Committee selected the presenters and topics that will provide attendees with superior session content
Trainers are updating their course material
The Qt Company Support team is doing finger dexterity exercises for code review, architecture guidance, & components assistance
Demos for the Network Lounge are being developed
Sponsors are being engaged
Fantastic networking evening party is in the works
You probably already know that your investment of time and money in QtWS will pay for itself and then some. Need help convincing your manager? Download the justification e-mail, tailor it to fit your situation, then send it on for approval.
You know what they sayabout theearly birdgets the worm…
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 3.5 beta1.
In this release we added highlights to the editor scroll bar, which allow you to quickly see where bookmarks, breakpoints, and search results are located in your document.
If you are working with C++, you’ll be happy to find many fixes for our code model. The Clang-based model backend received a major refactoring: We moved the actual work into a separate process, which should make us safer from bugs in Clang itself. Also, our binary packages got upgraded to use Clang 3.6.
On the Qt Quick side I have to notify you that we removed support for Qt Quick 1, from Qt Quick Designer. We also removed the Qt Quick 1 wizards, and support for profiling with V8. The visual designer for Qt Quick 2, the code editor for Qt Quick 1 and 2, and profiling of Qt Quick 2 from Qt 5.2 and later and of Qt Quick 1 are not affected.
We also removed support for BlackBerry 10 development, lacking a maintainer. QNX development is not affected by this.
There have been many changes for Android support, including fixes for Android M and 64bit. On OS X we added a locator filter that uses Spotlight as a backend for finding files on your whole file system. For CMake projects we added support for file targets when they are explicitly specified in the generated CodeBlocks file. There were many more feature additions and bug fixes. Please have a look at our changes file if you are interested in more.
There are many of you who have expressed disappointment with our decision to discontinue the Indie Mobile subscription product – we are disappointed with this decision as well. Our disappointment comes from the fact that we expected and believed from previous feedback that there in fact would be potential for this kind of product, as there has been tens if not hundreds of people who have expressed interest in that in different forums. Unfortunately, that potential has not materialized in real life, the adoption rate has been extremely low, and we were forced to discontinue that product as it requires resources that we are not able to justify by commercial terms. We did not expect this to be a gold mine for us, rather a product that would fill a demand gap in our offering, with a very affordable pricing. In the end, we must say that we did not see any real demand for this – having just some tens of subscribers is a testament to this. Our mistake was not to announce the retirement of that offering earlier, and we do apologize for that.
We do honor our current subscribers, and we would like to now offer, for a limited time, those who have been considering the Indie Mobile package the opportunity to still subscribe to it with the same price of $25/month. We will offer this until August 31. Please use the following link to take advantage of the offer: http://ift.tt/1HGHtRY. We will continue to honor all subscribers of Indie Mobile after August 31st, however, after that date we will no longer make new sales of the package and we will proceed with discontinuing it.
We are constantly looking for new business models and opportunities to serve our customers and community better. The discontinuation of Indie Mobile will enable us to invest in new things, and we still believe that there should be opportunities for other products like Indie Mobile. Our new Qt for Application Development offering provides all desktop and mobile platforms and the subscription price is actually a lot cheaper than it was previously ($350 vs. $399). The latest Vision Mobile CPT report names Qt #4 with 18% mindshare as a cross-platform mobile development tool. Vision Mobile, at least, believes Qt will catch up to the Top 3 in no time.
Thanks again for your feedback and we do apologize for not being transparent earlier with our plans for the Indie Mobile package. We hope that those that were planning to develop a commercial mobile app with Qt, take advantage of Indie Mobile before August 31st.
It is my pleasure to announce that Qt 5.5 has been released today. Over the last 6 months, we’ve been working hard to create a great release for you.
As a result, close to 1500 reported bugs have been fixed during this period, and we’ve implemented numerous performance improvements throughout the whole stack. We’ve filled a couple of holes in our cross platform offering, bringing better feature parity between the platforms in areas such as Multimedia and Bluetooth.
We have invested lots of efforts to make sure Qt 5.5 is ready for Windows 10 once it gets officially released by Microsoft. That Qt is running on top of the new WinRT APIs on Windows 8 already since Qt 5.3 gave us a great basis for those efforts. With this we are confident that we can fully support Windows 10 as soon as it is being made available with a Qt 5.5.x patch release.
Linux packages are now being built on RedHat Enterprise Linux, allowing to cover a wider range of Linux distributions (from RHEL 6.6 up to Ubuntu 15.04) with one set of binaries.
A lot of work has been put into the version for Mac OS X, where we now use Apple’s Secure Transport layer to enable SSL functionality, support Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE, support Qt WebView and fixed many issues with Qt Multimedia.
Simplified Product Offering
Another change coming with Qt 5.5, is a greatly simplified product structure. There are now three versions of Qt available.
Qt for Application Development is our commercial offering that allows you to create applications for all desktop and mobile platforms that Qt supports. It comes with full support and our flexible commercial licensing.
Qt for Device Creation is the second commercial product. It targets the creation of embedded devices, and comes with a lot of tooling and support to make this as easy as possible. Of course with full support and our flexible commercial licensing as well.
And finally, we have Qt Open Source, our open source version that you can use under the terms of the LGPL (version 2.1 and/or version 3) or GPL.
For more details about this new product offering have a look at our new product pages on qt.io .
New Functionality
As always, Qt 5.5 comes bundled together with the latest version of Qt Creator and a large amount of new functionality. Let me highlight some of them in this blog.
Bluetooth
The Bluetooth LE API that got introduced as a Technology Preview with Qt 5.4, is now final and supported on Android, Mac OS X and iOS in addition to the existing backends on Linux.
Graphics
With Qt’s root being a graphical toolkit, we have always had a strong focus on graphics. A good integration with OpenGL has been available since Qt 2 times. This integration has mainly focused on low level enablers and classes.
With Qt 5.5, we now take a large step forward, adding two new modules that greatly extend our set of 3D APIs:
Qt Canvas 3D is a new module that makes it very easy to directly use WebGL code from within Qt Quick. The module existed as a Technology Preview in Qt 5.4. We’ve taken the time since then to mature it, and I’m happy to now have it as a fully supported module inside the Qt frameworks. Qt Canvas 3D implements a WebGL-like API for Qt Quick, and can be used both with low level WebGL code or in conjunction with JavaScript frameworks such as three.js, making the handling of 3D content inside Qt Quick trivial.
The other new module is Qt 3D, available as a Technology Preview for Qt 5.5. Qt 3D existed as a library during Qt 4 times, but has now undergone some major rework to make it fit to the world of modern OpenGL.
Qt 3D takes our OpenGL support a large step forward making it much easier to integrate 3D content into Qt applications. The module comes with both C++ and QML APIs. For more details what Qt 3D 2.0 brings, you can check the Qt 3D documentation and the KDAB guest blog post. Being a Technology Preview, the module still has some rough edges. However, check out the Qt 3D game demo that V-Play managed to create already with the tech preview. Please let us know what you think, so that we can turn Qt 3D into a fully supported part of Qt with Qt 5.6.
Using OpenGL on Windows has always been somewhat problematic as good drivers are not available in all installations by default. Qt 5.5 helps solve this problem by switching dynamically between using the OpenGL driver or the ANGLE emulation layer implementing OpenGL on top of DirectX.
Qt Location
Another new module that now found it’s way to Qt 5.5 as a Technology Preview is Qt Location. Qt Location adds mapping, geocoding, routes and places support to Qt. In conjunction with the existing Qt Positioning API, it should give you all you need to create location aware applications. Qt Location can make use of different mapping providers. We currently support Nokia Here, Mapbox and Openstreetmap. Check out the examples in documentation.
Qt Quick
A lot of work has gone into improving Qt Quick. The QML and JavaScript engine now supports JavaScript typed arrays. In Qt Core, we added support for properties and invokable methods to Q_GADGETs, making it much easier to expose your own value based classes in QML. Qt Quick has gotten improvements to make Flickable and PinchArea work better on Mac OS X and iOS.
The Enterprise Controls have been folded into Qt Quick Controls and are now also available in the open source version. A TreeView control has been added to complete the set of controls required for creating desktop applications.
Qt Multimedia
A lot of work has also gone into Qt Multimedia. On Linux, we have now added gstreamer 1.0 support and lots of bugs have been fixed for the other platforms. Camera support has been greatly improved. The new Video filtering framework is a great new feature that allows the integration of frameworks, such as OpenCL or CUDA with VideoOutput elements.
Watch how Qt Multimedia with real-time video/camera integrates with the computer vision library (OpenCV) to create a real-time pattern recognition application that identifies speed signs on this short road trip. Further functionality could be added to this demo by, for example, displaying a warning if the vehicle’s speed exceeds the last recognized sign.
Qt WebEngine
Qt WebEngine has been updated to Chromium version 40 and has received new APIs for managing downloading of files, controlling cache and cookies, as well as settings. Support for Qt WebChannel is now built-in and many experimental APIs are now public and fully supported.
Other Improvements
Of course, there are a lot of other improvements and new features in Qt 5.5. Please have a look at the wiki for all the details.
Deprecated Modules
With all these new features coming, some older ones are being deprecated, namely Qt WebKit, Qt Quick 1 and Qt Script. All of these modules are still available with Qt 5.5, but we strongly recommend using their replacements for any new functionality: Qt WebEngine, Qt Quick, and Qt QML, which also provides a fully compliant JavaScript engine. For most uses cases, the new replacement modules should be more suitable and provide better functionality than the replaced ones.
Learn More about Qt 5.5
To ease you into Qt 5.5, we have scheduled 2 LIVE webinars (July 2nd & July 3rd) so you can hear first hand what is new in Qt 5.5. Please make sure to register here: http://ift.tt/1NwC26t.
Learn Even More at Qt World Summit 2015
Registration for the Qt World Summit 2015 (Oct 5-7, Berlin) is open. This is the main global Qt event where Qt experts from The Qt Company and the community will deliver 50+ technical and strategic sessions. Qt World Summit will give you the knowledge you need to kick start your Qt development project as well as provide you with the insight and tips and tricks necessary to make sure your Qt product is successful. Make sure to register today and take advantage of the Early Bird pricing (SAVE EUR 70) ending July 13th and/or learn about group discounts: http://ift.tt/1ARpViz.
Thanks!
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everybody who helped develop and create Qt 5.5. The release wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of many people in the community and from The Qt Company. A special thanks goes to KDAB, who invested lots of time and efforts to make the Qt 3D Technology Preview ready for Qt 5.5.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 3.4.2.
The main change in 3.4.2 is that our binaries are now based on the new Qt 5.5 release, benefitting from its support of a wider range of Linux distributions, and its other improvements. We also fixed recognition of the MSVC 2015 tool chain and a crash in the Valgrind analyzer.
This blog post is written by a guest blogger, the maintainer of Qt3D module and the Managing Director KDAB UK Ltd, Dr Sean Harmer.
KDAB is pleased to announce that the Qt 5.5.0 release includes a Technology Preview of the Qt3D module. Qt3D provides a high-level framework to allow developers to easily add 3D content to Qt applications using either QML or C++ APIs. The Qt3D module is released with the Technology Preview status. This means that Qt3D will continue to see improvements across the API design, supported features and performance before release. It is provided to start collecting feedback from users and to give a taste of what is coming with Qt3D in the future. Please grab a copy of the Qt 5.5.0 release and give Qt3D a test drive and report bugs and feature requests.
Qt3D provides a lot of functionality needed for modern 3D rendering backed by the performance of OpenGL across the platforms supported by Qt with the exception of iOS. There is work under way to support Qt3D on iOS and we expect this to be available very shortly. Qt3D allows developers to not only show 3D content easily but also to totally customise the appearance of objects by using the built in materials or by providing custom GLSL shaders. Moreover, Qt3D allows control over how the scene is rendered in a data-driven manner. This allows rapid prototyping of new or custom rendering algorithms. Integration of Qt3D and Qt Quick 2 content is enabled by the Scene3D Qt Quick item. Features currently supported by the Qt3D Technology Preview are:
A flexible and extensible Entity Component System with a highly threaded and scalable architecture
Loading of custom geometry (using built in OBJ parser or assimp if available)
Comprehensive material, effect, render pass system to customise appearance
KDAB and The Qt Company will continue to improve Qt3D over the coming months to improve support for more platforms, input handling and picking, import of additional 3D formats, instanced rendering, more materials and better integration points to the rest of Qt. If you wish to contribute either with code, examples, documentation or time then please contact us on the #qt-3d channel on freenode IRC or via the mailing lists.
