I will be talking about text in this post, specifically about cases where you have to handle a lot of it. We are not talking about a general solution, but a specific case that we encountered during a customer project. The Problem The project involved showing a chat room for internal communication. We developed a […]

We just released KDChart version 3.0.0! KDChart is a comprehensive business charting package with many different chart types and a large number of customization options. We are constantly improving the package, and have been doing so for years. This is the first release of KDChart that supports Qt 6, and both Qt 5 and Qt […]

For years, we at KDAB have been using Buildbot as our build and continuous integration system. Gerrit hosts all our projects and is our code review platform. Our deployment of Buildbot and build machines has naturally grown over the years. It builds hundreds of configurations and up to a thousand builds daily, but issues with […]

One of the most difficult choices to make when starting any new software project is that of the programming language and framework your team will use to create it. Should you stick with Qt because it’s the best tool for the job? Should you switch to something that uses web-based technology or is designed explicitly […]

In this article, I'd like to talk about Android storage. In recent Android versions, Google decided, for a good reason, to restrict the access to the SD card. This means, even if your application will have the old READ/WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions declared and granted, you won't be able to freely access the SD Card contents like […]

Porting legacy code from Motif, MFC, Photon, or a previous Qt version to a more recent Qt version can be a big challenge. There are a number of pitfalls in a large porting effort that can significantly increase time, cost, and complexity, leading to risk of project derailment. You may have languages, frameworks, and windowing […]

There are a few small, and sometimes already quite old, features in Qt that, when combined, can be a very nice way to deal with assets in your QML application -- especially if some of them live on the file system, some in a resource, and some may need localization or translation. Let's dive in! […]

With Apple moving to Apple Silicon for all of their new products, software developers are having to figure out how to support both Intel and Apple Silicon devices. Like some of our customers, you may not be ready to move to Apple Silicon. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily exempt you from dealing with universal binaries, especially […]

Every sizable project has a 'utils' file or folder that contains functionality that is needed more than once but too small to be a library. KDE is no different, except we want to share our 'utils' folder across hundreds of projects. This is where the KCoreAddons framework comes into play. The name comes from the […]

Some time ago, I wrote a post about integrating Qt's associative containers with the fancy new C++ features, range-based for loops with structured bindings. That post inspired KDAB's own Giuseppe D'Angelo to add the asKeyValueRange member function to both QHash and QMap. Now it's possible to iterate over them with a simple range-based for loop, […]

You have two choices when it comes to giving a custom style to your Qt widgets. Qt Style Sheets are very convenient for getting started -- just a few CSS-like rules, and they work. It is our experience, however, that Qt Style Sheets create too much trouble and a QStyle subclass (*) gives a better […]

Qt is a high quality library, but it is also massive in number of features. This massive number results in a higher likelihood that there are bugs that go unnoticed lying around in its less frequently used features or combination of features. Our friends at qgis.org hired us to solve some of those issues that […]

At KDAB, we have been investigating how to integrate Rust with Qt in a safe and idiomatic way. The solution we are currently working on is called CXX-Qt. It's available in the GitHub and on crates.io. This blog post discusses the journey of CXX-Qt -- where it started, where it can be used right now, […]

Writing mobile apps can be a lot of fun, especially with Qt and QML. But if your background is all about C++ and Qt, writing the entire required stack for a mobile app can be challenging. Adding push notifications, storing information, and having to write that with another language and framework might make you give […]

Here at KDAB, we recently published a library called KDBindings, which aims to reimplement both Qt signals and slots and data binding in pure C++17. To get an introduction to the KDBindings implementation of signals and slots, I recommend that you take a look at the KDBindings Getting Started Guide. It will give you an […]

We have just released version 2.1.0 of our KDReports developer tool product. KDReports generates printable and exportable reports from code and from XML descriptions. Developers write the code that integrates KDReports with the rest of the application. External designers or marketing and sales staff can be tasked with creating the report structure, or its appearance. […]

In a well-designed QML application, the UI is built using re-usable components, while the data and logic live in C++ based components we call controllers here. The QML part of the application uses these components (that themselves may be written in QML or C++) to build up the user interface and connect these components with […]

Another day, another small addition to KDToolBox, KDAB's collection of miscellaneous useful C++ classes and stuff. In this post, we're going to talk about KDFunctionalSortFilterProxyModel, which is a convenience subclass of QSortFilterProxyModel. What's a proxy model to begin with, and what's QSortFilterProxyModel? Well, that explanation requires a bigger space than what I have in this […]

We just released KDDockWidgets 1.5.0! What is KDDockWidgets? KDDockWidgets is a development framework for custom-tailored docking systems in Qt, to use when you need advanced docking that is not supported by QDockWidgets. It was created by Sergio Martins as a time-saving alternative to QDockWidgets. The ease-of-use of KDDockWidgets can save you lots of frustration as […]

Once again, the theme of the day is how to speed up Qt development with Visual Studio Code. In part 2 of this blog series, we walked through how to get a complete setup for your qmake and CMake projects, with a deeper look at the Qt side. This time, I will share a few […]