We are happy to let you know that the very first edition of Qt Desktop Days 2020 was a great success! Having pulled together the event at very short notice, we were delighted at the enthusiastic response from contributors and attendees alike. Over 500 registered attendees could enjoy five days of technical talks. The program […]

The KDDockWidgets 1.0 release is now available! What is KDDockWidgets? KDDockWidgets is an advanced docking system for Qt, with features that are not available in QDockWidget. See our first blog post, for a quick introduction and the motivation for a new docking framework. What's new in 1.0? We've come a long way since the initial […]

GammaRay 2.11.2 We have released version 2.11.2 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay, bringing support for Qt 5.15 and improved Qt Quick item picking. GammaRay is a software introspection tool for Qt applications developed by KDAB. Leveraging the QObject introspection mechanism it allows you to observe and manipulate your application at runtime. This works […]

Memory bugs are tricky. Leaks have a clear impact on performance, and quickly become hard to spot when heap allocated objects move too much. Memory access bugs, on the other hand, make your program crash right away, if you're lucky. In less desirable cases, they may end up corrupting random objects on the heap, and […]

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. […]

We have just released version 1.2.0 of Heaptrack, the fast heap memory profiler for C++/Linux applications. A bit of Background The Heaptrack fast heap memory profiler allows you to track all heap memory allocations at run-time. Afterwards, you can use the accompanying GUI tool to find optimization opportunities in your code by analyzing the recorded […]

We are pleased to announce a new release of our Hotspot Linux perf performance analysis GUI, Hotspot version 1.3.0! Hotspot is a replacement for perf reportthat takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical form. You can read a bit more about Hotspot here. Overview of […]

Python is a handy all-purpose language. It can make you very productive within a short time period and has powerful expressiveness for data manipulation and processing. Yet, it's not a great fit for lots of tasks. C++ is far better at achieving anything that needs bare metal performance, deterministic timing, or low-level access. Thankfully, some […]

Up until now, Qt 3D was relying on OpenGL for rendering. With the upcoming Qt 6, Qt will come with a rendering abstraction layer (Rendering Hardware Interface or RHI) to target not only OpenGL but also Vulkan, Metal and DirectX. We are in the process of adding RHI support to Qt 3D. This will allow […]

This is the story of a bug in an open-source project I maintain; as the maintainer I review and sometimes fix bug reports from the community. Last week, a user reported that the 'File' menu of the application was not appearing on macOS. Some investigation showed this didn't happen when using the default translation (i.e […]

TL;DR: If you choose a default translation in your Qt application based on a locale name like this: then please change it to: Some of your users (me!) will be thankful that your application appears in the same language as the rest of their system. Background I'm a Polish guy working with computers, mostly on […]

Common render issues and their solution -Part 3

If you are here from Part 1, you missed Part 2, somehow. You have tried everything from the first two parts that seemed applicable, and your screen is still a window to the void? No problem: we’ve gathered another five reasons black screen issues could be happening and how to go about fixing them. Issue […]

Today's blog post is about something that should be simple and apparently it causes trouble: how to declare a qHash overload for a custom datatype. This is necessary when we want to use custom datatypes as keys in a QHash. From the documentation: A QHash's key type has additional requirements other than being an assignable […]

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 […]

Common render issues and their solution - 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 […]

Due to Covid-19, the KDAB office in Berlin feels really empty. Some times, it's just me, working on hardware, and a few other guys dotted around. The office staff are all working from home. The Problem: My office is very far away from the door, yet, from time to time, KDAB gets deliveries and, as […]