sunnuntai 14. heinäkuuta 2013

First thoughts on Qt and Android

After the release of Qt 5.1 we all now have the opportunity to run some Qt apps on an Android device. Some neat examples by Digia can be found on the Play-store (Qt 5 Everywhere and Introduction to Qt 5).

Even though this is a developer preview of Qt on Android/iOS the experience already feels quite good. The UI is very responsive and the OpenGL demos look awesome. One issue I've found so far is that loading custom Fonts with FontLoader doesn't work at this point. I'ts really weird because a custom font is nonetheless succesfully used on the Qt 5 Everywhere demo...

One word of warning for the C++ hybrid coders. When creating QQuickItems synchronously (not multithreaded) with the QQmlComponent class, there is a notable lag on a mobile device (even with a monster like Note II). Qt also offers an asynchronous method for creating QQuickItems but I've yet to master its usage (to my understanding the asynchronous method involves QQmlIncubators that create the QQuickItem on a separate thread to avoid freezes in the UI).