KDAB's Kevin Funk presented Using Modern CMake with Qt at Qt Virtual Tech Con last month. He reported that the Qt Company did a great job moderating the sessions at this event, and there was a lively Q&A at the end - Kevin had to pick from about 60 questions, so this is a hot […]

My first project when I entered KDAB was the migration of a multi-million lines Motif application to Qt... feels quite scary said like that. Fortunately, migrations from any toolkit to Qt is something KDAB has been doing from the beginning, and has lots of experience with. You may be wondering what this has to do […]

Qt has a long history. The first stable version was released before the first version of C++ was standardized and long before the different C++ compiler vendors started shipping usable implementations of the C++ standard library. Because of this, Qt often followed (and still follows) some design idioms that feel unnatural to the usual C++ […]

Qt 3D, being a retained mode high level graphic API abstraction, tries to hide most of the details involved in rendering the data provided by applications. It makes a lot of decisions and operations in the background in order to get pixels on the screen. But, because Qt 3D also has very rich API, developers […]

A few weeks ago, we published an article with an overview of Visual Studio Code through the eyes of a Qt developer. In this short blog series, I will show you how to get up to speed with a Qt project using Visual Studio Code more in detail. Before digging into the Qt parts, I'd […]

The upcoming version of the C++ Standard (C++2a) is proposing to deprecate certain usages of the volatile keyword, by adopting the P1152 proposal (Deprecating volatile). Despite the somewhat "flamboyant" title, the actual deprecated parts are very limited and indeed the paper limits the deprecation to somehow language/library corner cases and/or dangerous antipatterns. For instance certain […]

Did you miss the past Qt World Summit? Were you there, but you couldn't attend that talk or two that you really wanted to see because the conference was so, so packed with awesome content? Fear no more! We are glad to announce that the talks at the past Qt World Summit 2019 in Berlin […]

A few days ago Marc Mutz, colleague of mine at KDAB and also author in this blog, spotted this function from Qt's source code (documentation): Apart from the mistake of considering empty strings not uppercase, which can be easily fixed, the loop in the body looks innocent enough. How would we figure out if a […]

Have you ever noticed code highlighting disappearing in Qt Creator for some projects, without any apparent reason? Can't get Ctrl+Click to work on any class name or function name anymore? Maybe you have ignored it at first, got used to it, and decided it's just one of those things that just "happen sometimes"; or maybe […]

While the concept of multithreading may be straightforward, code with threads is responsible for some wicked bugs, which can be nearly impossible to reproduce or track down. This makes writing bullet-proof code using threads a tall order. Let's look a little deeper into why that is. First, you need better than average knowledge about the […]

Continuing our blog series about KDToolBox, this time we will discuss UiWatchDog, a keepalive monitor for the GUI thread. Alive? A fundamental rule when writing applications in event-driven UI frameworks such as Qt is: do not ever block the GUI thread! The GUI thread is also usually called the main thread of the application -- […]

Software developers like tools, and in particular tools that make them more productive. So in this blog post, I am going to share with you some of the experiences some of us here at KDAB have had using Visual Studio Code for Qt development. Motivation of using Visual Studio Code instead of Qt Creator The […]

Right from the start, unu wanted to add a stylish, first-class embedded high-res display to their second generation electric scooter. Like many top-class engineering companies, unu didn’t have in-house expertise for building a modern UI, so they decided to partner with KDAB to build a modern UI based on Qt. In this video you learn […]

KDDockWidgets is an effort by KDAB to provide an advanced docking system for Qt. Throughout the years KDAB has contributed and funded QDockWidget development. Sadly, this wasn't without pain: each change took many days to implement and an equal amount of time to fix regressions. QDockWidgetmixes GUI code with logic/state in a spaghetti manner, making […]

As mentioned in the previous article in this series, Qt 3D 5.14 is bringing a number of changes aimed at improving performance. Most people familiar with Qt 3D will know that the API is designed around the construction of a scene graph, creating a hierarchy of Entities, each of them having having any number of […]

Qt 3D makes heavy use of threads, as a way to spread work across CPU cores and maximize throughput, but also to minimize the chances of blocking the main thread. Though nice on paper, the last case eventually leads to added complexity. Sometimes, there are just one too many threads. In the past, we've been […]

As you already know KDAB is the largest independent contributor to Qt code. Of course we didn't get lazy and we've added a lot of cool stuff to Qt 5.14. In this article I'm going to write about the super cool stuff that we've added to Qt 5.14 for Android. Android multi arch build in […]

With this blog post we are going to kickstart our brand new blog series about KDToolBox. The first class we're exploring is KDTableToListProxyModel, a table-to-list proxy model. The main use case for KDTableToListProxyModel is exposing tabular models to Qt Quick. Qt Quick has a certain number of "view" elements that only support list models: for […]

At KDAB we invest a significant amount of efforts in research and development. We are always looking for new tooling, libraries and utilities that can make our job easier and improve the C++ and Qt ecosystems. Ultimately, the gained knowledge and skills make our customers happier. As part of this process we develop lots of […]

We have released version 2.11.0 of our Qt application monitoring tool GammaRay. GammaRay allows you to observe behavior and data structures of Qt code inside your program live at runtime. GammaRay 2.11 comes with a new inspection tool for Qt's event handling, providing even more insights into the inner working of your application. Besides looking […]