KDMacTouchBar A quick introduction

17.12.2019 Colin Ogilvie No comments

Back in February we wrote about our work to add ‘MacOs touch bar‘ support to Qt. Between then and now, support has been added in QtCreator:

KDMacTouchBar in QtCreator

However, the changes have not been integrated upstream in Qt, which means there is still no easy way to add support to your own applications. KDAB is happy to provide this via KDMacTouchBar, available as both LGPL and commercial licence.

This provides touch bar support as a separate library, supporting both qmake and cmake as a build system. Support can be quickly added to any new or existing application using code similar to this example:

MainWindow::MainWindow()
{
    setWindowTitle("KDMacTouchBar Example");
    resize(400, 200);

    // attach a touchbar to this window
    KDMacTouchBar *touchBar = new KDMacTouchBar(this);

    QIcon qtIcon(QStringLiteral(":qtlogo.png"));

    // add item
    QAction *action = new QAction(qtIcon, tr("Qt with touchbar"));
    touchBar->addAction(action);
    connect(action, &QAction::triggered, this, &MainWindow::activated);

    // separator
    touchBar->addSeparator();
    touchBar->addSeparator()->setText(tr("More items:"));

    // and more items
    QAction *action1 = new QAction(tr("Item 1"));
    touchBar->addAction(action1);
    connect(action1, &QAction::triggered, this, &MainWindow::activated);

    QAction *action2 = new QAction(tr("Item 2"));
    touchBar->addAction(action2);
    connect(action2, &QAction::triggered, this, &MainWindow::activated);

    // make special escape button
    QAction *quit = new QAction(tr("Quit"));
    touchBar->setEscapeAction(quit);
    connect(quit, &QAction::triggered, this, &QWidget::close);
}

KDMacTouchBar from example

There has also been some investigation into custom QML views within the touch bar, although this is not currently included in KDMacTouchBar. Stay tuned for news when it eventually comes out in the near future!