The new Qt Design Studio 2.0 release has been announced and now comes with a brand new 2D effects redesign and a technical preview of Qt Bridge for Figma
Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and create stunning User interfaces and experiences.
With that in mind, this release comes highly focused on enhancing the user experience. For starters it is now possible to lock items to protect them against unintended changes.
Qt Design Studio 2.0 Release Telemetry and Crashpad Support
Qt Design Studio 2.0 release now comes with a crash reporter based on Google Crashpad. Google Crashpad is a mechanism for capturing, storing, and transmitting postmortem crash reports from an application to an upstream collection server. Qt Design Studio 2.0 uses Sentry as the backend service for these purposes.
The Qt Creator Telemetry Plugin now ships with Qt Design Studio 2.0. It is disabled by default and has to be explicitly enabled by the user. It is safe to note that no personal data, such as names, IP addresses, MAC addresses, or project and path names are collected.
Thumbnail Generation
Generation of thumbnails for custom components with an icon that visually resembles the component is now supported in this release. Qt Design Studio then provides a tooltip with a full preview of the component. This helps to find the correct component and makes it more convenient to get an overview of the project and its structure which is very useful for large projects.
Technical Preview of Qt Bridge for Figma
This release now comes with a technical preview of a Qt Bridge for Figma. Figma is an interface design application with an emphasis on team collaboration. Qt Bridge for Figma is not installed by default but is delivered with Qt Design Studio as a developer plugin that you can install to the Desktop version of Figma through the Plugin Manager.
MCU support
Qt Design Studio supports creating projects that are limited to the feature set of Qt for MCUs. This means if the user creates a Qt for MCUs project using the correct wizards, features that are not available for Qt for MCUs will be disabled in the UI. This includes many imports, everything related to Qt Quick 3D, but also many properties in the property editor will be disabled.
Qt Design Studio 2.0 release also comes with experimental support for Qt 6. If you develop 2D Qt Quick applications, then Qt 5 and Qt 6 are fully compatible.
Logic Helpers
With the Logic Helpers, it makes it easier to perform certain operations without having to write code. Elements in the Item Library after being added and can only be dragged into the navigator because they are not visible items. The Logic Helpers make it easy to setup Bi-Directional Bindings, map numbers to strings with a defined precision.
With these, you can replace the occasional usage of JavaScript expressions for conditions or to properly convert numbers to strings.
Qt Design Studio 2.0 Release 2D Effects Redesign
The way 2D effects work in Qt Design Studio has been changed in this release which is now more aligned with the Qt Quick framework. Effects are now children of the item they affect and no longer Qt Quick Items nor not part of the item hierarchy.
The result is adding effects like blur, glow, or masks become easier as they can now be dragged in from the Item Library and dropped on the target item.
Important to note is stacking effects in a single item is not supported. The workaround is to stack multiple items with one effect applied to each item resulting in emulated effects.
Qt Design Studio 2.0 release can be updated through the online installer for those with the commercial license or those wanting the free community version It can also be updated from the Qt account portal found here. The Photoshop and Sketch bridges are included in the commercial Qt for Design Studio license but can also be purchased separately via the Marketplace, and used with the community version for GPL/LGPL projects.
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