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What's New in Qt 6.5

New and Restored Modules in Qt 6.5

Qt 6.5 adds the following modules and tools:

New and Restored Modules in Technical Preview

Note: API and ABI stability is not guaranteed.

  • Qt Location's Map renders 2D maps into a Qt Quick application. MapView includes Qt Quick Input Handlers to implement the typical interactive features (zoom, pan, tilt).
  • Qt GRPC supports communicating with gRPC services using classes generated based on service descriptions from protobuf .proto-specifications.
  • Qt Protobuf supports generating, serializing, and deserializing Qt-based classes from protobuf .proto-specifications.

New Features in Qt 6.5

Qt Core Module

  • QTimeZone can now package a Qt::TimeSpec and, when relevant, an offset in a lightweight time representation that unifies the various APIs of QDateTime and QDate that took either a QTimeZone or a Qt::TimeSpec and offset.
  • Introduced application permissions API to allow applications to check or request permissions for features that require user consent before use.
  • New cross-platform tracing backend in Common Trace Format (CTF).
  • QBindable can now be constructed from any property with a NOTIFY signal. This lets you integrate existing, non-bindable properties with bindable properties.
  • The qt_generate_deploy_app_script CMake function preferably accepts an argument called OUTPUT_SCRIPT now. Passing the old FILENAME_VARIABLE is deprecated.

Qt GUI Module

  • Reintroduced classes QWindowsMimeConverter and QUtiMimeConverter for handling drag'n'drop and clipboard data in platform specific formats on Windows, macOS, and iOS.
  • QVulkanInstance now enables Vulkan Portability physical devices by default. This is required to be operational with newer MoltenVK versions on Apple platforms. Added a NoPortabilityDrivers flag that lets you opt out from this.
  • The Vulkan rendering infrastructure is now using VK_EXT_debug_utils instead of the deprecated VK_EXT_debug_report and VK_EXT_debug_marker.
  • QTextLayout::glyphRuns() can now return the string index corresponding to each glyph when this is requested. Made available through the new function QGlyphRun::stringIndexes().
  • Checkbox list items can now be read and written in HTML as well as Markdown, including conversions.
  • Added QGuiApplication::setBadgeNumber() to provide feedback to the user about the number of unread messages or similar. The badge will be overlaid the application's icon in the Dock on macOS, the home screen icon on iOS, or the task bar on Windows.

Qt Quick Module

  • TableView got support for editing cells using an edit delegate.
  • TableView got support for resizing rows and columns using the mouse.
  • TableView got support for setting row and column sizes explicitly.
  • TableView got a new signal layoutChanged(). This signal can be used to, for example, reposition overlay items.
  • TableView got support for doing multi-selections.
  • Added support for specifying separate RGB and alpha blend factors in a QSGMaterial.
  • The Qt Quick scenegraph is now automatically using persistent, disk-based caching of graphics pipelines or the intermediate format shader bytecode, depending on the platform and the 3D graphics API in use. This is expected to reduce the time spent on creating the graphics pipeline in subsequent runs of the application. In addition, QQuickGraphicsConfiguration provides explicit control over if and where this data is written out and loaded from. This enables advanced use cases such as shipping a pre-seeded cache file with an application or device, which also accelerates first-time startup.
  • PinchHandler has new scaleAxis and rotationAxis grouped properties, offering several new values, including the activeValue property which is new in all the handler axis groups. It also got the activeTranslation and persistentTranslation properties that DragHandler already had.
  • DragHandler's xAxis and yAxis have new activeValue properties.
  • PinchHandler's activeScale (which was previously called scale) is no longer restricted to the range between minimumScale and maximumScale: these limits apply only to persistentScale. Likewise, activeRotation (previously rotation) is no longer restricted to the range between minimumRotation and maximumRotation. These limits are applied the same way for native touchpad pinch gestures as on touchscreens.
  • TapHandler::exclusiveSignals now lets you make the singleTapped and doubleTapped signals exclusive.

Qt Labs Animation Module

Qt Quick Controls Module

Qt Test Module

Qt Widgets Module

Qt Positioning Module

Qt Serial Bus Module

All new classes are experimental and are subject to change.

Qt Network Module

  • Introduced QHttp1Configuration. The class can be used to configure the maximum number of connections used per host when using HTTP 1 (default: 6).
  • QNetworkRequest on Qt for WebAssembly gained the UseCredentialsAttribute attribute, enabling withCredentials for the underlying XMLHttpRequest.

Qt QML Module

  • Added API to QQmlApplicationEngine and QQmlComponent to load/create QML elements via their module URI and type-name. In contrast to the URL based functions, this also works with C++ types and inline components.
  • QQmlListProperty properties now behave more like arrays, gaining support for methods like map(), reduce() and forEach(). The same holds for other sequence types, like QList<int> and similar.
  • Extended the qmltc to support more qml constructs, notably translation bindings, inline components, singletons, and signal handlers for C++-defined signals.
  • The QML script compiler can handle additional constructs. In particular:
    • console.log() and friends
    • let and const
    • qsTr() and friends
    • arg() for strings
    • all the remaining bitwise and shift operators
    • the exponentiation operator
  • The QML Disk Cache can be controlled in a more fine-grained way using the new environment variable QML_DISK_CACHE.
  • Added new public CMake API:
    • Introduced a Qt CMake policy to set a better default for the resource prefix. If QTP0001 policy is set to NEW, the QML engine will always be able to find your QML modules in the resource file system.
  • The qt_generate_deploy_qml_app_script CMake function preferably accepts an argument called OUTPUT_SCRIPT now. Passing the old FILENAME_VARIABLE is deprecated.

Qt Quick 3D Module

  • Added automatic level of detail (LOD) support for models. This allows generating simplified versions of the meshes during asset import and then automatically picking the appropriate level when rendering.
  • Added explicit level of detail (LOD) support to control the opacity of models based on the camera distance.
  • Added ExtendedSceneEnvironment, with built-in effects for depth of field, color grading, glow, vignette, lens flare, and others. These effects are performed together, increasing efficiency compared to individual, stand-alone post-processing effects, each requiring one or more render passes.
  • Enhanced DebugView with rendering statistics, the list of active mesh and texture assets, and live render pass information, as well as controls to interactively toggle settings, such as wireframe mode and material overrides from DebugSettings.
  • Added DebugSettings, available via SceneEnvironment, allowing programmatic control over settings such as wireframe mode and material overrides to only render certain aspects of physically based materials.
  • Added InfiniteGrid, implementing an infinite grid in the horizontal plane with fade out.
  • Added built-in, simple fog support, available via SceneEnvironment. When enabled, this applies a depth or height fog effect when rendering the models in the scene.
  • Improved picking when instanced rendering is used.
  • Added vertex color support for PrincipledMaterial and SpecularGlossyMaterial
  • Reflection probe: added support for using a provided cubemap texture instead of rendering the scene.
  • Post-processing effects were enhanced to properly react to changes in shader source file URIs at run time.
  • Added persistent, disk-based caching of runtime-generated material shader data. This is expected to improve application startup and view change times.

Qt WebView Module

Qt Multimedia Module

  • The ffmpeg media backend, being a technical preview in 6.4, becomes the default for macOS, Windows, Android, and Linux except for Yocto distribution. The native backends are still available with limited support.
  • Introduced QScreenCapture class that is a new type of video input. It's possible to direct video from QScreenCapture through QMediaCaptureSession to outputs, e.g. QMediaRecorder or QVideoWidget. The screen capture functionality is available only with the ffmpeg media backend.

Platform Changes

WebAssembly

  • Added binary package with multithreading enabled to Qt Online Installer.
  • Added support for the File System Access API. File dialog calls such as QFileDialog::getOpenFileContent() and QFileDialog::saveFileContent() will now use this API, if supported by the browser.
  • Added support for the Local Font Access API. Qt will now use local fonts on browsers which support this API.
  • Added tech preview of video playback and camera support to Qt Multimedia.
  • Added configure option for WebAssembly SIMD: -feature-wasm-simd128
  • Added configure option for WebAssembly exceptions: -feature-wasm-exceptions
  • Published Qt Web Utils with utility functions and Qt on web usage examples.
  • QTest for WebAssembly now uses emrun by default. A specialized script for WebAssembly drives the execution of automatic tests.

Desktop Platforms

Windows

  • The environment variable QT_WIN_DEBUG_CONSOLE can be set to see stdout/stderr messageges in a console window for GUI applications that are started from the command line. Set it to new or attach.

macOS

Wayland Client on Linux

  • Now supports fractional_scale_v1 protocol for compositors that suggest fractional scale factors for the client.

Mobile Platforms

Android

  • Updated Gradle to 8.0 and the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) to 7.4.1 (requires JDK 11 or above).
  • Updated NDK to r25b (25.1.8937393).
  • The list of supported versions is now Android 8.0 (API 26) or later.
  • Bump the minimum platform build sdk version to 33 (QT_ANDROID_API_VERSION).
  • Support more operations on content scheme URIs with Qt file/dir facilities.
  • Fixes and documentation updates for QStandardPaths under Android Scoped Storage.
  • Print Qt JNI exceptions from Qt and not the Android System.
  • Fixed support for APK Signature Scheme v2.

iOS

Embedded Platforms

Boot to Qt

  • Boot to Qt stack was updated to use yocto 4.1.2 (langdale).
  • Support for macOS host using Docker-based toolchains.
  • The Support Levels for Target Hardware were updated and there are now multiple levels of support that apply across specific hardware and OS combinations.

List of API Changes

These pages contain an overview of API changes in Qt 6.5:

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