Qt 5.10 Release

Releases, Qt5, Qt 5.10

Qt developers have announced the release of Qt 5.10, which is marked by the introduction of new functionality, as well as the release of Qt 3D Studio.

Qt 3D Studio

As the name suggests, Qt 3D Studio is a graphics editor used to create 3D user interfaces and is built from the NVIDIA Drive Design product that NVIDIA brought to Qt earlier this year.

Qt 3D Studio contains a runtime component that runs in your application and a graphical tool for designing and building the user interface. Although the tool is a standalone application, the runtime can be easily integrated with the rest of Qt.

Qt 3D Studio will work with both Qt 5.9 and 5.10. The 3D Studio runtime component and application are available under commercial and GPL licenses.

Qt Qml, Qt Quick и Qt Quick Controls

Many interesting things have happened in this area. Qt Quick now has a plugin that allows you to place randomly generated elements in the scene

The new pointer handlers are the next big new feature in Qt Quick. This is a big step forward for Qt Quick and greatly improves handling of more complex multi-user cases. Instead of using Mouse- and TouchArea to handle these input events, you can now bind handlers for different types of pointer events to any element. Support for this is still in technology preview.

In addition, Qt Quick has received more small improvements. Chief among them is support for direct loading of ETC1 and ETC2 compressed textures, multisampling support for layers, and some properties to customize font handling.

Qt Quick Controls 2 also received many new features. First of all, two new styles are now available. One of them is education based style which makes it very easy to use your own illustrations to create a custom look. The other one, called Fusio style, is desktop oriented. These styles also support palettes.

Action, ActionGroup and MenuBar elements have also been added. Outside of MenuBar, Actions are also supported on buttons, delegates, and menus. In addition, we have added many smaller features to the existing controls.

Qt Qml finally supports declaring enums in QML and dynamically relays all strings when the language changes.

Graphics

A massive new graphics area feature is the new QPA plugin, which allows you to pass the full Qt user interface to any WebGL-enabled browser.

On the OpenGL side, QSurfaceFormat can now be used to query sRGB compatible framebuffers, and the full set of OpenGL ES 3.2 APIs is now available on all platforms via QOpenGLExtraFunctions.

Qt 3D

Thanks to KDAB, Qt 3D has also gained a couple of new features. There are new types of nodes that can be used in frame graphs, such as proximity filter and framebuffer splitting. There is now support for Shader Graphs, which allows you to create shaders from Graph-based Description, Skeletal Animation System Technology Preview, and the Scene2D Qt Quick element, making it easy to embed Qt 3D content into Qt QuickTime.

In addition, the focus on Qt 3D development is now gradually shifting away from developing all the necessary features to improve performance and reduce memory consumption.

Qt 3D will also become much more important in moving Qt forward. Work is currently underway to create a runtime for Qt 3D Studio on top of Qt 3D to unify the architecture for all 3D-related APIs and tools.

Qt Core и Network

Qt Core now has a brand new QStringView class that is conceptually similar to std::string_view. At the moment, some const functions from QString are still missing, but this will be completed for Qt 5.11.

Qt Core also received a new QRandomGenerator class that provides a high quality random generator and access to seedless random numbers generated by hardware or operating systems. There is also now a set of explicit endian big/small data types (qint16_le etc.) and a KeyValueIterator for our associative containers that provide STL compatible iteration semantics over those containers.

Qt Network now supports OpenSSL 1.1, stores HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) policies permanently in QNetworkAccessManager, and implements an h2c protocol update used by non-SSL SSL/2.

Qt Widgets

Added a few small functions such as QWidget::createWindowContainer() on Android, enabling QOpenGLWidget to render and capture off-screen content, added a tabStopDistance property to QTextOption and QTextEdit, and an API for better selection handling for QLineEdit. Now QDockWidgets can be thrown from side to side.

In addition, a large set of bugs have been fixed in this module for Qt 5.10.

Embedded functionality

While most of the above elements improve the overall offering, both for application development and device building, there are also some elements that focus on embedded systems.

The Qt virtual keyboard has received support for many new languages and handwriting support for Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

On the Boot2Qt side, device images have been updated to Yocto 2.3 (Pyro), giving you a more modern Linux to work with.

Other modules

Updated Qt WebEngine to use Chromium 61. You can now pause and resume downloads and start them programmatically.

On the Windows desktop, you can now use the UWP server for Qt Bluetooth on Windows, and on X11, the Qt X11Extras module can now peek into the event queue.

Finally, Qt Network Authorization (which provides OAuth 1 and 2 support) and Qt Speech which provides text-to-speech support have moved out of technology preview to be fully supported in 5.10.