Design Featured at the Qt World Summit in Berlin
November 19, 2019
Blog
This year?s event, which was held at the Berlin Congress Center Nov. 4-6, featured industry keynotes from Google, Trend Micro, and web psychologist Nathalie Nahai, among others.
The Qt Company hosted the Qt World Summit, an annual gathering of the Qt ecosystem, earlier this month in Berlin, Germany. This year’s event, which was held at the Berlin Congress Center Nov. 4-6, featured industry keynotes from Google, Trend Micro, and web psychologist Nathalie Nahai, among others. Topics discussed ranged from the future of connected cars to Python integrations and multi-display implementations.
Qt experts shared insights into Qt’s technology and design ecosystem, as well as best practices and new ways of working. In addition to the keynote sessions, Qt World Summit had over 70 sessions, hosted and presented by Qt customers, partners, and R&D experts. This year, Qt is extending the conference to Asia, with the Qt World Summit Tokyo on November 29 at the Bellesalle Onarimon Tower.
Talking to the CEO
We were able to catch up with Qt Company CEO Juha Varelius after his Keynote, and spoke to him on the show floor in this video. In it Juha talks about the event, and how it brings the engineering community together to demonstrate and discuss the future of the IoT, enhancing user experiences, and creating the devices that will serve the applications of the future.
Squish
One of the issues in device development today is the integration of functionality in a way that it is easy to implement by the user. The user interface is a critical aspect of any product, be it hard or soft, and testing that interface can be a tough and complex endeavor. Squish for Qt from Froglogic is an automated cross-platform GUI testing solution for Qt applications on desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms.
Squish for Qt from Froglogic is an automated cross-platform GUI testing solution
Also used by the Qt Project, Squish automates the functional regression and system tests of graphical user and human-machine interfaces. Features include support for all major GUI technologies, support for all desktop, mobile, web and embedded platforms, test script recording, object identification and verification, an integrated development environment, and full support for Behavior Driven Development.
Patient monitoring
At the Toradex stand, among other displays on view, was a demo of a patient monitoring system using an advanced interface providing a comprehensive and self-guided user experience. The system enables users to easily visualize health data such as ECG, pulse oximetry, and blood pressure.
This interface enables users to easily visualize health data such as ECG, pulse oximetry, and blood pressure
Designed by Boston UX, the solution underscores the importance of presenting information and enabling system oversight and management in an easy and intuitive manner. The demonstrator also used devices from NXP (nxp.com) and ARM (arm.com) in its construction.
Automotive
Among the pressures on automotive designers, beyond developing and integrating advanced technologies in a vehicle to provide next-generation functionality, that functionality must be presented to the driver and other vehicle users in a clear and intuitive way. There was a Qt Instrument Cluster demo showing different features of Qt 5.6 and the Qt Automotive Suite, driving functionality such as Qt Quick Controls, Qt 3D, Qt Location, Qt Multimedia, and Qt Serialbus for CAN-Bus integration.
An intelligent instrument cluster presents functionality to the driver and other vehicle users in a clear and intuitive way
Qt Automotive Suite is a product offering built on top of the Qt toolkit and its framework and tools, providing a comprehensive infrastructure of libraries, tooling, hardware adaptation, and ready-made solutions to enable the building of innovative user experiences rather worrying about technology infrastructure. The Renesas RH850/D1M microcontroller used has up to 5 MB embedded flash, 3.5 MB embedded RAM, and dedicated features for instrument clusters with middle or high level 2D drawing. The RH850/D1M also integrates a 2D GPU, Sprite Engine, JPEG Unit, HUD Warping Engine, and the RAM Wrapper, and supports an external memory interface up to DDR2.
Industrial
This same need to present information and enable control in an effective manner also exists on the factory floor. Industrial automation and smart facilities demand intelligent user interfaces, and there were also solutions for that at the event. This demand was also addressed on the exhibit floor, with demonstrations such as this industrial panel demo showing various UI cases using Qt Quick and Qt Ultralight capabilities. The panels underscored Qt cross-platform capabilities by running the same UI on different platforms, in this case a Cortex-A, Raspberry Pi 3B, and and STM32F769 microcontroller.
This industrial panel demo shows various UI cases using Qt Quick and Qt Ultralight capabilities
Enabling designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs, Qt Design Studio is a design tool that both designers and developers can use to not only design and develop, but also makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. The most notable addition to Qt Design Studio 1.2 is the Qt Bridge for Sketch, which allows the seamless importing of designs to Qt Design Studio. Delivered with Qt Design Studio as a plugin that you can install, Qt Bridge for Sketch is very similar to the Qt Bridge for Photoshop, and already includes support symbols.
Looking forward
The world of design today is a complex and challenging place, full of disruptive technologies and the existing and emerging application spaces that are taking advantage of them. Events like this one by the Qt Company are great ways to bring the design engineering community together to address problems and share solutions.
