Qt World Summit 2018 Boston

This year's North American stop on the Qt World Summit world tour was in Boston, held during the Red Sox’s World Series win. Most of us were glad to be flying home before celebration parades closed the streets! The Qt community has reason to celebrate too, as there’s an unprecedented level of adoption and support for our favorite UX framework. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, you missed the best Qt conference on this continent.

Strong Community

One thing was clear: after 23 years, Qt is still going strong. The Qt Company and the greater Qt community have contributed 29,000 commits and fixed 5000 bugs between Qt 5.6.3 and the current head branch. Very kindly and much appreciated, Lars Knoll, CTO of the Qt Company, recognized KDAB as the largest and longest external contributor to the ever-growing Qt codebase in his opening keynote. All of this effort – and most of the things discussed in this blog – come to fruition in Qt 5.12 LTS, with an expected release date at the end of November.

Qt is Everywhere

Another observation is that Qt is everywhere. Lars shared that it has now been downloaded five million times, a huge increase from three and a half million just two years ago. The more than 400 attendees at Qt World Summit Boston came from over 30 industries, representing academia, automotive, bioscience, defense, design, geo imaging, industrial automation, energy and utilities, and plenty more. All the training sessions and the talks were well attended, most to full capacity with eager attendees standing at the back.

Cross-platform Qt

Is there a reason for this upsurge in Qt interest? Multi-platform is now a critical strategy for nearly every product today. Since Qt provides comprehensive support for mobiles, desktops, and embedded, it has become a top choice for broad cross-platform UX development. It’s not enough to release a cool, innovative product – if it doesn’t link to your desktop or provide a mobile-compatible connection, it often can’t get off the ground.

Qt 3D Studio

In a programmer’s worldview, design is often a nice-to-have, yet not a must-have. I guarantee that perspective will change for anyone who had the good fortune of attending Beyond the UX Tipping Point, the keynote from Jared Spool, the so-called Maker of Awesome from Center Centre.

Building Bridges

Maybe all this flurry of Qt activity is also because it provides a common platform that can build a bridge between disparate disciplines like art, technology, and research. An example of this is nanoQuill, a collaboration between KDAB, the Qt Company, a biotech company: Quantitative Imaging Systems (Qi), and Oregon Health & Science University that crowd-sources electron microscope images of cancer cells for people to artfully color, thus #color4cancer.

Based on Qi's vision of merging programming and computer graphics with microscopy, nanoQuill built an application to use machine learning on these human colored images to discern cell micro structures, which in turn helps us understand how tumour cells develop resistance to escape cancer-targeting drugs.

CNC Craftspeople

Another great merger of art and technology was seen at our KDAB customer showcase from a company called Shaper Tools. If you think you saw a table full of dominos at the edge of our booth, we weren't passing the time playing – those "dominos" were actually optical registration tapes that allowed Shaper's hand-held CNC machine to perfectly cut complex shapes. Look at some of the amazing projects that woodworkers have created using the Shaper Origin, and you'll see that advanced technology doesn't have to replace master craftsmanship – it can enable it.