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.

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.

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.