Qt Contributors Summit 2013 Recap

This year's Qt Contributors Summit was held in conjunction with KDE Akademy in Bilbao, Spain. The event was well attended by engineers from many diverse organizations that share a vital interest in the ongoing development of the Qt libraries.

Lars Knoll, chief maintainer of Qt from Digia, opened the two-day workshop with an overview of the state of Qt in general. He outlined that the release of Qt 5.1 had brought many improvements in stability and stated consequently; commercial customers are beginning to port Qt 4 based code to Qt 5 with great success. Lars further explained that the Qt-Project is well on its way to reaching the goals for the Qt 5.2 release.

The session closed with the new maintainer for the mobility APIs outlining his plans for the next release followed by the module maintainers, who each gave a short overview of where things currently stand.

In the afternoon, many productive and sometimes heated discussions in general were heard and the day concluded with Digia's Tuukka Turunen explaining his ideas about how to create a vibrant marketplace around Qt based services.

New Qt features required to serve modern mobile and touch enabled platforms governed Day 2 discussions.  BlackBerry not only has emerged as adopting Qt, but also has shown accountability by contributing actively to the community. The folks at BlackBerry also displayed their gratitude toward the Qt developers by providing new Z10 phones to the participants of the conference.

Mobility, multimedia, Android and iOS were the subject of discussions for the remainder of the day.

This year’s conference was very optimistic and the event attracted many people dedicated to making Qt stronger than ever, a positive return from last year’s uncertainty with the transition between Nokia and Digia.

Overall, the Qt Contributors Summit is an extremely important event for Qt's vibrant global ecosystem and this year demonstrated the continued support and enthusiasm.