Qt Welcomed to the Tizen.org Infrastructure

We're excited to announce... yes you read this everywhere. But hey, we are sharing this news with true enthusiasm! Qt for Tizen source code is now officially a part of Tizen's dedicated repositories. This means the Tizen project now combines both standard improvements from Qt as well as Tizen-specific integration from the five prior Alpha releases of Qt for Tizen. Every change in the code can now be reviewed using Tizen.org services.

5th Update of Qt for Tizen

Fresh Alpha 5 update brings improvements of Qt Quick Controls, aligns to newer Tizen 2.2.1 and standard Qt 5.2 RC 1 released week ago.

Read on to discover what new and enhanced features of Qt for Tizen are available for mobile and IVI users.

Tizen and Qt at OpenFest 2013

OpenFest is the biggest annual Bulgarian conference dedicated to open-source technologies. This edition of the event took place at Interpred Business Center Sofia on 2^nd and 3^rd November. OpenFest is a free event and couple thousand people visited it. As usual the schedule was busy and talks on variety of open-source topics were simultaneously held at three different halls. This year discussions about Tizen and Firefox OS made a debut on the stage of OpenFest. Another attraction was the open-source hardware hackathon organized by Olimex where a hundred lucky enthusiasts were able to get free OLIMEXINO-85 kits and to solder Arduino on their own.

Sky Is the Limit for Qt Games on Tizen

We had the opportunity to ask software engineer Thorbjørn Lindeijer to share his experience of using Qt for Tizen for developing Source of Tales, an online roleplaying video game. On Tizen smartphones it's an adaptation of earlier code to a full Qt Quick app and thus runs with true OpenGL hardware acceleration.

Small Step for Qt, Prodigious Upgrade for Tizen: 3.0, New SDK, IVI & Wayland

Alpha 4 is an unprecedented addition of Qt solutions that makes Tizen more interesting for application developers, designers and system integrators. Broad array of development options is now available from single Qt Creator-based SDK. If you're demanding one native SDK that can target Tizen, Android, iOS, specialized embedded systems and desktops, and more, do not look further!

Meet Qt for Tizen at SmartDevCon 2013

The Qt for Tizen project was invited to give a lecture at SmartDevCon so you can meet the undersigned there on Saturday, September 14, 11:15. SmartDevCon is a conference aimed at companies and specialists working on modern device solutions such as tablets, smartphones, game consoles, connected TVs and In-Vehicle Infotainment. Quite a bit of that is related to Tizen. Among others, guys doing Qt-related R&D from Samsung, Jolla and Ubuntu can be met in a single location!

Our talk is called Porting Qt to a new Smartphone for Fun and Fame. The idea is to tell a story about how Qt can adapt to your project needs, form factors and new devices, how it improves the way you work with them. Qt for Tizen is a case study here.

Smartphone Sensors

Sensors App demonstrates rich Qt's support for sensors on Tizen smartphones. It is available in Qt for Tizen 1.0 Alpha 3 and newer.

Available sensors include rotation, compass, accelerometer, gravity, proximity and light sensor, gyroscope, and magnetometer.

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.

Tizen @ QtCS 2013 (part 2)

This is second and last part in a log from the Qt Contributors Summit 2013 (QtCS) written with Tizen in mind. In part 1 I covered Tizen Q&A and some topics related to the Qt frameworks. Today I'd like to share more juicy news about upcoming frameworks, some platforms news and Qt business.

Frameworks Sessions

New QML Elements

dbwilldo CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s useful to have access to global data structures in applications to capture state of the business logic in a form of singleton. In QML it is not different but so far (in 5.1 and before) there were no official means to do that without asking C++ or JavaScript for help. This is going to change with a new notation of a QML singleton based on a new pragma keyword:

// OtherType.qml
pragma singleton
import QtQml 2.0
QtObject {
  property int foo: 3
}

// main.qml
import QtQuick 2.2
import "."
Item {
  width: 20 + OtherType.foo
}

Tizen @ QtCS 2013 (part 1)

A quick recap of the Qt Contributors Summit 2013 (QtCS) in the context of Tizen. It was second main Qt Project event for me aimed at contributors where the outcome of discussions and planning directly affects direction of Qt development. This way development of Qt itself isn’t happening behind closed doors but is a meritocratic, consensus-based process. (In addition to this summit, users of Qt have their Developer Days in Europe and the USA every fall with that many topics and this year first Starter Edition debuts specifically tailored for people new to Qt, managers, or returnees looking for a refresher on the basics, please consider attending!)

Looking back, I come from a desktop mindset with fair share of work in specialized or embedded UIs. After 15 years of using Qt for most of my software development needs I found my portfolio started to include some of "mobile development" too. This year it seems I am not unique in this. Importance of mobile in the Qt development ecosystem is well reflected by the number of sessions related to mobile: be it the Qt Quick 2 graphical stack or the QML language. Having that area secured, Qt Quick takes a whole round to also include support for modern desktop mouse-driven interfaces. In addition QtCS was co-organized with KDE Akademy where mobile-related topics were first-class too.

Qt Joins Tizen Store Ecosystem

Many of you, Qt fans, may remember the recent alpha 2 update of the Qt application development platform for Tizen. It has enabled Qt applications to natively run on actual Tizen smartphones.

Now we have reached another milestone: Tizen Store Support! Today the Tizen Store team has accepted our first Qt Controls app created for test and educational purposes:

Meet Us At The Qt Contributors Summit 2013

The Qt Contributors Summit (aka QtCS) is the main Qt Project event. QtCS 2013 is the third edition after the successful launch of Qt Open Governance in 2011.
 
It's invitation-only event for Qt contributors, not users (for users there are Qt Developer Days), scheduled for Monday-Tuesday, July 15-16 in Bilbao, Basque Region, Spain. This year QtCS joined forces with KDE Akademy what is especially great for me as a KDE contributor. For program see the wiki page. Much more topics are planned and as usual will appear in real time during the meeting since it's an unconference. If you are interested but cannot attend for any reason you can still expect a lot of materials to be public. I think discussions will also float to online communities too.

Qt for Tizen Gets Feature Boost

Second alpha release of Qt for Tizen 1.0 concludes 30 days of intensive development of the mobile-optimized, cross-platform application and user interface development framework. We have a number of thrilling news to share with you!

Following the approach introduced in the first alpha each release of Qt for Tizen delivers two products, Qt framework for Tizen and Qt Tizen Integration. We have upgraded the Qt framework to benefit from the newest Qt mobile technologies. A number of new GUI Qt Quick controls have been added, each compliant with the Tizen guidelines, without sacrificing the legendary comfort of development and portability of Qt code to other platforms. Finally, applications built with Qt properly run on actual Tizen smartphones

Qt for Tizen Merchandise

Just like the code, we have carefully crafted t-shirts and other merchandise. Visit qtfortizen.spreadshirt.net. Use with pride and fun!

There's even something stylish for geek girls :)

PS: You can use the MYSHIRT2013 voucher code for 15% off until 7th June and further 10-30% off for volume orders. No, we're not making money on this :) Just support us by wearing these clothes and drinking from these mugs.

PS2: When making any composition like these, please read these usage guidelines for Qt and for Tizen.

Qt 5.1 Cinematic Experience Demo on Tizen Devices

Qt Cinematic Experience is a famous QML application that demonstrates the power of Qt 5 and the new additions in Qt Quick 2.0. The app uses Qt Quick particles, sprites, path animations, shader effects and other cute graphical effects.

Qt Cinematic Experience demo app is running successfully on two different Tizen reference devices: RD-210 and RD-PQ. Both devices have been updated by flashing Tizen 2.1 (Nectarine) and the QML app is powered by Qt 5.1 for Tizen. Hardware acceleration has been enabled on the devices by installing Mali DDK for Tizen 2.1. The frame rate is approximately 60 frames per second on both devices.

Qt for Tizen on TDC'13

The second annual Tizen Developer Conference was held in San Francisco from 22 May to 24 May 2013. The conference engaged a worldwide audience and was the perfect place to demonstrate the progress of the community-driven port of Qt for Tizen.

After hours of hard work Tomasz and the other Qt contributors were able to cross compile Qt 5.1 for Tizen ARM devices just on time for the beginning of the conference. Several QML example applications including the famous Qt Cinematic Experience demo were presented on Samsung reference device RD-PQ with Tizen 2.1 Nectarine. The demo applications are working smooth although the port is in very early stage of development.

Qt Launches on Tizen with Standard Look and Feel

Ten days after we said Hello to the world, we're happy to announce Qt for Tizen 1.0 Alpha 1 release containing a mobile-optimized, cross-platform application and user interface development framework.

Qt for Tizen is a common name for two products:

Qt framework for Tizen, currently based on Qt 5.1 beta, works with Tizen Emulator. Thanks to exceptional cross-platform nature of Qt most of the work was related to configuring and building the binaries. Qt Creator SDK can be already used for developing new applications and porting existing ones.

Qt Tizen Integration, now introducing basic set of native controls with default look and feel of Tizen mobile profile. All these controls are based on cross platform API of Qt Quick Controls Style introduced in Qt 5.1.