Alpha 3 Tightens Integration with Tizen

Summer time brings third Alpha release of Qt for Tizen. Aside of improved integration with Tizen operating system we're also tracking development of Tizen 2.2. This resulted in new interesting features for anyone who loves to cook apps with Qt: new default black UI theme and support for hardware buttons.

Detailed Changes

Changes in Qt framework for Tizen

• Support for Tizen 2.2-like theming (desktop, emulator and RD-PQ smartphone). Black and white theme is now implemented and black is the default as on Tizen 2.2 OSP. It is possible to dynamically change current theme at run-time.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Advancements in Qt Quick Controls for Tizen. Central place (singletons) has been added for common Tizen configuration that specifies fonts and color palette. Background is now specified by theme. When running on desktop, hardware buttons can be emulated by pressing Esc and F2 keys.
  
  
• Example apps:
  
  • Controls Gallery app. This version adds support for changing themes. OpenGL ES 2 Shaders technology nicely integrated with Qt has been used for custom animation when theme changes.
    
    
    
    
    
  • Sensors app (new) demonstrating Qt's support for smartphone's sensors:
    
    
    
    
    
    
  • Simple Twitter app (new) demonstrates how to display custom list views. The app is theme-aware:
    
    
    
    
    
    
  • Hello World app (new).
  
  As always all examples have been published with full source code (qt-tizen-1.0-alpha3.tar.gz below) for use in your applications and for learning.
  

Changes in Qt Tizen Integration

• Added detection for screen rotation when device orientation changes (emulator and the RD-PQ smartphone)
  
  
  
• Added sensors handling (for emulator and RD-PQ smartphone): rotation, compass, accelerometer, gravity, proximity and light sensor, gyroscope, and magnetometer.
  
  
• Improved handling of application lifecycle. Clicking the Home button sends active application to the background. When the same app is started again, it shows in previous state.
  
  
• Added support for hardware buttons introduced by Tizen 2.2 (desktop, emulator and RD-PQ smartphone)
  
  
  
  
  
• Multiple minor improvements

Downloads

• Qt Framework and Integration for Tizen and Qt Tizen Integration: qt-tizen-1.0-alpha3.tar.gz, 17 KiB. It only contains build tools, the Qt source code is based on 5.2 alpha and will be fetched automatically from repositories by the scripts. See the desktop/README document for desktop build, and emulator/README for emulator build. The same is in gitorious alpha3 branch of tizenbuildtools.
  
• Qt Controls app: QtControls-1.0.0-arm.tpk for RD-PQ smartphone (12 MiB), QtControls-1.0.0-i386.tpk for emulator (13 MiB). Tizen 2.2 required.
  
• Qt Sensors app: QtSensorsC-1.0.0-arm.tpk for RD-PQ smartphone (12 MiB), QtSensorsC-1.0.0-i386.tpk for emulator (13 MiB). Tizen 2.2 required.
  
• md5 sums for the above files.
  

Known Issues

See this wiki page for a list of known issues.

Further Plans

Further integration between Qt and Tizen specifics and services is in the plans. Qt SDK for Tizen for many Linux distributions and support for Mac OS X and Windows would be added later. Our roadmap is developed in the open.

Credits

Software development for this release has been contributed by Tomasz Olszak, Witold Wysota and Jarosław Staniek. Valuable advices, testing and improvements were offered by Leon Anavi, J-P Nurmi, Jens Bache-Wiig, Rangel Ivanov and numerous other Qt Project contributors. Recently joined Sebastian Sauer and Friedemann Kleint. All contributors are listed on the wiki page.

Join Us!

Remember, you can always join us! Not only as a software developer - if you love technology, recently a Media Partners program has been launched to better reach global and local communities and individuals potentially interested in Tizen and Qt for Tizen itself.

Updates

If you wish to follow the initiative or comment please do so below on this blog or at your convenience use the following sites:

• Tizen Native Application Development forum for users
  
• Mailing list for developers of Qt for Tizen is the same as the Qt Development mailing list: development@qt-project.org (subscribe here)
  
• Mailing list for users (of Qt): interest@qt-project.org (subscribe here)
  
• Blog - articles and announcements
  
• Twitter @QtForTizen - latest news
  
• Facebook @QtForTizen - latest news
  
• Google+ community - latest news
  
• Video channel qtfortizen
  
• IRC channel: #qt-tizen at irc.freenode.org (you can also connect via web browser here)
  

About

Qt for Tizen is an initiative by software developers and for software developers, aimed at bringing the full Qt Creator-based developer experience to Tizen application design and development. Potential reuse of prior Qt, C++ and QML knowledge gained by several hundreds of thousands of software engineers is especially beneficial. The project is purely community-driven and free software/open-source friendly so anyone can join. Detailed introduction to the initiative is available on the Qt Project wiki.

QfT fans, Warsaw, Poland