The Need for Simple & Modular QR Generation in QML Recently, our designer Nuno Pinheiro needed to generate QR codes for an Android app in QML and started asking around about a simple way to do this. The best existing QML solution was QZXing, a Qt/QML wrapper for the 1D/2D barcode image processing library ZXing. […]

Wait, there’s more? Yes, indeed. Qt Desktop Days delivered a lot of great content we’ve just got to share. VLC and Qt, a history If you need to play the widest variety of audio, video, or streaming formats on the planet, you probably know about VLC (the “cone player”). But did you know that VLC […]

What is Akademy? Akademy is the yearly conference for the KDE community, which is a community devoted to creating free software for desktop and mobile. Typically, Akademy takes place in a different city each year. However, due to the pandemic, the conference was online this time around. September 4-11 marked the dates of Akademy 2020. […]

In vehicle infotainment systems and instrument clusters are getting larger and more complex, requiring an exponentially growing base of software to drive them. Furthermore, KDAB finds that self-driving technology does not obviate the need for displays – in fact, autonomous technology seems to be accelerating the trend for larger and more capable graphics software. To […]

This year's North American stop on the Qt World Summit world tour was in Boston, held during the Red Sox’s World Series win. Most of us were glad to be flying home before celebration parades closed the streets! The Qt community has reason to celebrate too, as there’s an unprecedented level of adoption and support […]

So, last time we spoke, I left you this teaser... I mean how hard could it be? right? OK So, hum, an easy enough exercise..... for a path-based animation like we saw last time. But how do I draw such a path? How do I time the inflections in speed for that path, since time […]

Sometimes data visualization might call for more than a graph - you need to visualize complex data, such as that generated by city lighting, in three dimensions to get the full effect. KDAB decided to put together a showcase for the Qt World Summit that allowed us to demonstrate Qt 3D's capabilities as a performant […]

As my first subject for this animation blog series, we will be taking a look at Animation curves. Curves, or better, easing curves, is one of the first concepts we are exposed to when dealing with the subject of animation in the QML space. What are they? Well, in simplistic terms, they are a description […]

In the beginning there was … That’s how things start, right? And in the beginning there were punch cards. The UI was rudimentary direct machine language, so we could say there was no UI.So let there be light! In very simplistic terms that was a screen where one could type text (using a keyboard) and […]

Quick: When you design C++ APIs, when and how should you use pair and tuple? The answer is as simple as it is surprising: Never. Ever. When we design APIs, we naturally strive for qualities such as readability, ease-of-use, and discoverability. Some C++ types are enablers in this regard: std::optional, std::variant, std::string_view/gsl::string_span, and, of course, […]

So far we talked about the technical aspects of scaling your application, the dpi, the number of pixels, its nature, the nature of image formats and the implications of all that on the creation of visual elements for your UI. But this is only a part of the problem, for although all this helps you […]

Vectors. Moving away from my original plan, today we will be talking about Vectors. To start this series of posts I had a main motivator, SVG. It is a great file format, it's the file type I use day in day out and the format I use the most to create all of my images... […]

In the previous blog post, we talked about the importance of pixels and their indivisible nature, the way we deal with that in the icon area and introduced the concept of PPI dependable UIs - all this to have truly scalable graphics in QML. We used the BorderImage element to illustrate how an element could […]

In the earlier post, we talked about the difficulty of scaling Uis across the current PPI range we have on the mobile and embedded space. We also hinted that the most common way to avoid this problem was done via providing several image assets that help to mitigate this issues. How does it work? How […]

A User Experience is not defined to exist in a single form factor any more. It is expected to be able to flow from one device to another, seemingly adapting itself to each interaction paradigm, and yet retain branding, mood and overall look and feel across multiple platforms. On the other hand, it's expected that […]

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the internals of the QML engine. In today's post, we'll examine the concept of custom parsers in QML. Recap In the first blog post of the series, we covered how the QML engine loads QML files. One important concept was that every element in the […]

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the internals of the QML engine. In the last blog post, we covered how bindings in the QML engine work. In this post, we'll examine the different kind of bindings. Some of this content is already covered by my DevDays talk QtQuick Under the Hood. […]

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the internals of the QML engine. In the last blog post, we covered how the QML engine loads QML files. To recap, QML files are parsed and then C++ objects are created for all elements in the QML file. For example, we saw that when […]

In this series of blog posts, we'll look under the hood of the QML engine and uncover some of its inner workings. The articles are based on the Qt5 version of QtQuick, QtQuick 2.0. Most people know that each element in a QML file is backed by a C++ class. When a QML file is […]