After four months of intensive development work, I am happy to announce that the first QStringTokenizer commits have landed in what will eventually become Qt 6.0. The docs should show up, soon. While the version in Qt will be Qt 6-only, KDAB will release this tool for Qt 5 as part of its KDToolBox productivity […]

Today, KDAB is releasing version 1.2 of the 3D integration workflow Kuesa 3D, built on top of Qt 3D. Kuesa™ 3D is a complete design-to-code workflow solution for 3D in real-time applications, centered around the open glTF™ 2 format, supported by Blender, Maya and 3ds Max. In short, Kuesa provides a workflow that simplifies work […]

In the last blog post we saw an essential, C++ oriented, Visual Studio Code setup. That was enough to get going right away, but we can still definitely do more and better. Here I'll show you how to get a complete setup for your qmake and CMake projects, all this while also wearing a Qt […]

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 […]

Part 2 If you are here from Part 1, welcome back. If you are wondering why we started at Part 2, go to Part 1. So, you tried everything from the first part (that was relative to you), and your screen is still a backlighting test? No problem. (Well.. I mean, clearly there is but […]

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 […]

KD SOAP is a tool for creating client applications for web services. The release of 1.9.0 brings a fair number of improvements and fixes, as the following text describes. General C++11 is now required. Qt4 is still supported, but this is the last release with support for Qt4. rpath for Unix/Linux/macOS (#181) is now fixed. […]

Working on color imagery for QiTissue recently, I realized we were accidentally losing the alpha channel in multiple places. For efficiency reasons, we keep colors in memory using the QRgb type, and convert that to/from QString for serialization purposes via QColor as needed. Here's what I discovered about why that doesn't work, and some ways […]

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 […]

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have been around since the 1950's, far longer than most other types of computer applications. Their rock-solid performance has been responsible for the streamlining of any industry that needs precise and consistent controls: building automation, energy management, part machining, printing and packaging, robotic assembly, ship building, water treatment, […]

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 […]

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 […]