Meet Qt Contributors at the Tizen Developer Conference 2014

In case you're close to San Francisco next week, don't miss the Tizen Developer Conference 2014 because Qt is covered there rather extensively! On Tuesday, June 3 at 2:15 pm, top contributor of the Qt for Tizen project Tomasz Olszak will introduce people (these that are for some reason not yet accustomed with it) cuteness of Qt and its Tizen port. His presentation is called Qt and Tizen together can do more. Everyone will have opportunity to talk to Tomasz in person during the three conference days.

Other Qt for Tizen contributor, Leon Anavi will popularize porting Tizen to open-source hardware devices for beginners. Leon is known for his ports of Tizen to various devices where Qt apps worked just fine from early days. His presentation is scheduled on the same day at 11:30 am.

Just after Leon's talk you would also definitely want to meet another great Qt for Tizen contributor Philippe Coval (RzR) from Eurogiciel who will talk on about cooperating with upstream projects and packaging tips and tricks (Tuesday, 12:15pm).

If that's not enough, you can meet Thiago Macieira, Software Architect from Intel who is not only maintainer of Qt Core and Qt D-Bus modules of but is also responsible for the Tizen 3.0 open governance.

See the entire schedule of the conference. Have a lot of fun and productive time!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.