So, you've just poured your heart and soul into some real-time 3D rendering code and hit render. Wringing your hands in anticipation you wait for the screen to show your marvellous creation. Still... waiting. It says it's done but, nothing. Well, maybe not nothing but simply darkness. You stare into the deep dark […]

Qt has a long history. The first stable version was released before the first version of C++ was standardized and long before the different C++ compiler vendors started shipping usable implementations of the C++ standard library. Because of this, Qt often followed (and still follows) some design idioms that feel unnatural to the usual C++ […]

When I came to KDAB to work, working at home was a bit of a culture shock for me - I’d previously only ever worked in an open-plan office and had sworn that home working was not for me – I’d never manage to get anything done! However, I’ve found that home working suits me […]

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 […]

We have released version 2.11.1 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. The changes mainly focus on establishing full compatibility with Qt 5.14 as well as bugfixes and performance improvements, but there's also a few new features. Areas most affected by changes in Qt 5.14 are the inspection of Qt Quick software rendering, deployment on […]

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 […]

At Qt World Summit in 2019, KDAB offered five Introductory courses (one was given by our partner, froglogic), and three advanced classes., as follows: Introductory Course descriptions Introduction to Qt 3D Studio, trainer: Nuno Pinheiro This training introduces designers and developers to 3D content workflows and concepts, giving them a solid grounding in creating content […]

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 -- […]

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: 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 […]

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 […]

Right from the start, unu wanted to add a stylish, first-class embedded high-res display to their second generation electric scooter. Like many top-class engineering companies, unu didn’t have in-house expertise for building a modern UI, so they decided to partner with KDAB to build a modern UI based on Qt. In this video you learn […]

KDDockWidgets is an effort by KDAB to provide an advanced docking system for Qt. Throughout the years KDAB has contributed and funded QDockWidget development. Sadly, this wasn't without pain: each change took many days to implement and an equal amount of time to fix regressions. QDockWidgetmixes GUI code with logic/state in a spaghetti manner, making […]