Digia finally acquires the Qt

Digia today announced that it has completed the acquisition of the Qt software technologies and Qt business it announced in August 2012. As Digia now becomes responsible for Qt activities including product development and commercial and open source licensing, the acquisition paves the way for Qt to become the world’s leading cross-platform application development framework across desktop, embedded and mobile platforms.

Used by over 450,000 developers worldwide, Qt is a full framework that enables the development of powerful, interactive and platform-independent applications. Qt is a proven and solid technology used across many different industries to provide extensive applications beyond what is possible with many other cross-platform technologies. Qt applications run native on the host system, delivering performance that is far superior to any other cross-platform application development framework. With Qt, developers can not only take full advantage of the multicore processors in desktops and high-end smartphones, but also deliver impressive graphical performance on low-end and low cost embedded hardware. Qt’s support for multiple platforms and operating systems allows developers to save significant time related to porting to other devices. Once developed on a Windows desktop PC, for example, an application’s code can be re-used on a smartphone, tablet computer or embedded device.

Qt comes with a built-in tool-chain, IDE and an extensive set of C++ frameworks. The Qt Quick technology allows for rapid and easy creation of dynamic and interactive user interfaces. Using Qt Quick’s declarative programming method, which couples QML and JavaScript with a powerful C++ engine, leads to optimally performing and visually stunning user interfaces. Qt's built-in features such as full support for HTML5 through the Qt WebKit module provide an easier and all-in-one solution for hybrid application development where pure web technologies fall short.

Qt already runs on leading desktop, embedded and real-time operating systems, as well as on a number of mobile platforms. Digia has initiated projects to deliver full support for Android and iOS mobile and tablet operating systems within Qt and will present the product roadmap and strategy later in the fall. Adding this support will extend one of the most popular and powerful development frameworks to cover the fastest growing and most popular smartphone and tablet operating systems.

Digia will continue the work with ecosystem members and the Qt community to secure a successful release of Qt5 and is committed to continuing the Qt Project in order to maintain Qt’s availability under both open source and commercial licences. Digia now has over 200 dedicated people working on Qt. The 89 Qt team members who have now joined Digia include many key players of the Qt community, of whom Lars Knoll, Chief Maintainer of the Qt Project, is one of the most experienced members of the Qt ecosystem.

Lars Knoll, Chief Maintainer of Qt Project, Digia commented: "I look forward to the exciting next chapter for Qt together with Digia. Qt 5 Beta was released during the acquisition process and we are working hard to reach a final release within the next months. Qt 5 is a huge step forward for Qt and, with technologies such as Qt Quick or the improved WebKit module, Qt is making many things trivial that are very hard to achieve with other technologies. Qt being developed as an open source project, with a vibrant and strong community behind it, greatly increases the strength of the technology. I am now very much looking forward to bringing the product to new platforms such as Android and iOS."

Tommi Laitinen, SVP, International Products, Digia, commented: "Qt has already proved to be exceptionally popular with developers because of its easy-to-use libraries and ability to generate efficient, high performance applications in minimal time. Our intention is to continue to work towards the goal set out by Trolltech, Qt’s originators, to develop a framework that enables users to ‘write code once and deploy everywhere’. Adding support for Android and iOS, together with the most widely used embedded operating systems, will give us the potential to target hundreds of millions of products and to help make Qt the dominant force in the software development world."

New open source Calligra Suite release enhances ODF document support

Calligra is a fairly young open source office suite that shows promise, an expert said

Calligra has published the second stable release of its open source suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets and a sketching program. The new version greatly improves the support of Open Document Format (ODF) documents, said one of its main developers on Tuesday.

The Calligra Suite is an application suite for Linux that includes programs not found in traditional office suites, so the development team prefers to call it an "integrated work applications suite."

"Calligra is for the kind of people that are allergic to the word 'office'," said Boudewijn Rempt, maintainer (head developer) of Calligra's Krita sketching program.

Calligra 2.5 is the second stable version of the suite. The team also released a QML (Qt Modeling Language) -based version for tablets and smartphones called Calligra Active, and said that Calligra Active will be the main mobile version of the suite going forward.

Calligra is currently developing a version of Calligra Active for Android, Rempt said.

Krita was updated with a new composition docker that is useful for storyboard generation. And Krita added textured painting and performance improvements among other enhancements, Calligra said on its website. Database program Kexi, diagram application Flow and presentation program Stage were also updated, as well as spreadsheet program Sheets.

Version 2.5 also brings improvements that benefit all the suite's applications. For instance the management of autosave files is improved, there is a new system for managing user profiles and there is a new system connecting shapes like diagrams or flowcharts, according to Calligra.

Rempt said that Calligra could still use some other improvements. "The next step is Windows," he said, adding that the installer for Calligra for Windows isn't perfect. The main problem is finding open source developers that want to make Calligra available on Windows, according to Rempt. The Windows effort may require financial backing instead of relying solely on volunteers, he added.

Calligra's actual user base is hard to estimate, Rempt said. However, at the moment there are between two and three million Nokia N9 phones that use a documents app based on Calligra. Krita is downloaded about 20,000 times every month on a Windows machine, and the experimental Windows installer for the whole suite is downloaded about 5,000 times a month, he said, Besides that, Kubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, has decided to make Calligra a default application, according to Rempt.

One of Calligra's biggest competitors is open source office suite LibreOffice, according to Rempt. "That really is a good and mature suite," he said, adding that while Calligra currently has a fraction of LibreOffice's user base, it has more applications and is not as dependent on big vendors such as Novell and RedHat as LibreOffice is.

That Calligra does not attract as many users as LibreOffice is "perfectly alright at this moment", said Rempt, since the team would like more time to improve the functionality of the suite.

Calligra is a relatively young but promising suite, said Michiel Leenaars, vice chairman of the OpenDoc Society, an organization that promotes the use of ODF and open document standards in the Netherlands. "The market for Office suites is dominated by a small number of solutions that originated from the eighties and nineties of the past millennium," he said in an email. Calligra does not have that ballast since it is from this century, it was forked from KOffice in 2010, and was built from scratch, he added

Calligra's Krita competes at the moment more with specialized software than with simpler editors in other office suites, Leenaars said. One other plus for Calligra is that it is developed keeping touch devices like tablets and mobile phones in mind, he added.