Sign up for the KDAB Newsletter
Stay on top of the latest news, publications, events and more.
Go to Sign-up
Giuseppe D’Angelo
22 July 2015
Good news, everyone! Qt 5.5 has just been released!
The release process of Qt 5.5 has been focused on stabilizing and improving performances. Once more KDAB is proud to be a part of the release, with its engineers constantly providing contributions and patches, as demonstrated by the commit graph of the last 16 weeks:
In this blog post I am going to show some of the features developed by KDAB that you are going to find in Qt 5.5.
Qt3D is available as a Technology Preview with Qt 5.5 and is targeting Qt 5.6 for an initial release. Qt3D provides C++ and QML APIs to allow the easy creation and integration of compelling 3D content in your Qt-based applications without having to invest time into writing a generic 3D renderer.
The renderer in Qt3D is completely configurable from QML and C++ APIs by means of providing a so-called, framegraph. This allows Qt3D to be configured dynamically at runtime to control the OpenGL pipeline to achieve customised rendering algorithms, special effects and post processing. Moreover, Qt3D provides more than a 3D renderer. It is also a general purpose, soft-realtime simulation framework built on top of a highly multithreaded architecture.
Your feedback on use cases and APIs is much appreciated! You can get in touch with the engineers developing it on the Qt mailing lists, as well as on the #qt-3d
IRC channel on Freenode.
For more information on Qt3D, please refer to our blogs around 3D and Qt3D.
A major drawback of Qt on iOS has been the inability to properly use video elements in a Qt Quick 2 scene. Video rendering had to be layered on top of the application, making it impossible to have it fully integrated with the other elements in the scene (for instance, placing other elements on top was impossible).
Due to demand by several customers, KDAB engineers managed to resolve the issue and contribute the relevant code upstream. Now the decoding of video elements on iOS is accelerated by the GPU, and they can be freely placed and transformed in a Qt Quick 2 application. For more information, please refer to this blog post.
The QOpenGLFunctions_4_4_Core
, QOpenGLFunctions_4_4_Compatibility
, QOpenGLFunctions_4_5_Core
and QOpenGLFunctions_4_5_Compatibility
classes have been added to QtGui. They provide automatic entry point resolutions for the respective OpenGL version / profiles.
Please refer to the documentation of QOpenGLContext::versionFunctions
for more information on how to use these classes.
qtplugininfo
is a small utility which dumps a Qt plugin's meta data. This is extremely convenient in order to debug plugin loading issues.
In no particular order:
A special mention goes to all the bug fixes and minor enhancements, whose constant stream ultimately make Qt so robust and reliable. The list is too long to be reported here. Find out more and how you can contribute to Qt.
Stay on top of the latest news, publications, events and more.
Go to Sign-up
Upgrade your applications from Qt 5 to Qt 6 with KDAB’s migration services. Get a free migration assessment and join a hands-on workshop to prepare your team for a successful transition!
Learn more