Very Hot New Stuff

K', Hot off the presses, here's some New Stuff for you, with the Quickness! ...terribly sorry about that, i shall endeavour to do better. Let's try that again.

As of KDE Frameworks 5.63, released on 2019/10/12, we officially introduce the fruits of my labour over the last few months, the shiny, new Qt Quick components, which were created to bring the Qt Quick submodule of KNewStuff up to par with the old QWidget based UX. Not only that, they also bring with them some shiny, new abilities in KNewStuff, which previously did not have any concept of comments outside of the very basic information of how many a content item had (which, incidentally, was also incorrect, and had been since, well... since that code was written about a decade ago - guess nobody noticed, because the information is a bit useless on its own).

Before running off and explaining what's what, have a video of my presentation from Akademy 2019, where i gave an overview of the new components and functionality:

Or, indeed, download the mp4 file by clicking right here.

Now, before you hop over to the API documentation and start digging in to work out how to actually use all this hot new stuff really quickly (sorry), here's a really quick visual rundown of some of the shiny stuff:

You know this. It's the KNS::Button button, but now more Quick [API]. Don't use this unless you're doing some porting, keep going...

The dialog we all know and love, but with a twisty twist and shiny new tile types [API] Don't use this either (with a similar caveat), use the next thing instead!

The new Page. The new intended central access. Shown here in the similarly new test tool. [API]

The entry details dialog, except as a Kirigami Page [API]

A lot of entries have multiple options for stuff to get - the DownloadItems Sheet shows those. [API]

You want comments? We got comments! All automatic, except if you feel like doing something much deeper. Have a model. [API]

Authors are important. So we should trust what they tell us they're called, and what they look like, right? Anyway, a super easy data provider Component for Author information. [API]

When you have a UI-less library that needs to get some feedback from the user, what do you do? Well, KNewStuff uses a QuestionAsker system. [API]

If you (like Peruse) was already using the old Qt Quick components List and Item, they still work just fine. In fact, finer than they did before by a fair chunk. Do consider using the Page, though. [API]

i hope you have enjoyed your screenshots and videos ;) Now go forth and implement getting that hot new stuff in your Qt Quick applications!

Also don't hesitate to mention, when you discover it, the various holes in the documentation that undoubtedly are there, so that we might get those fixed. Even better yet, we are very happy to take patches over on Phabricator, both code and documentation ones. One thing that i know is missing is a porting guide, to help people transition from the old QWidgets based stuff to the Qt Quick components for people who have got applications they're looking to port or are already porting.

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The word of the day is: Shiny. Because shiny things are neat ;)