It now requires the use of Qt 5.7.1 or later

Jan 4, 2017 02:00 GMT  ·  By

2017 kicked off for KDE users with the first Beta release of the upcoming Kirigami 2.0 UI framework for building convergent user interfaces that work on mobile and desktop platforms, as announced by Thomas Pfeiffer.

While the first public preview of the Kirigami UI framework hit the streets at the beginning of August 2016 and reached the 1.1 milestone two months later, at the end of September, it looks like the Beta of the major 2.0 release is ready for developers interested in test driving it to produce convergent UIs.

And the improvements keep on coming, as Kirigami 2.0 Beta is now fully ported to Qt Quick Controls 2, Qt's next-gen standard controls for graphical user interfaces designed using the modern Qt Quick UI technology, offering devs a much more extended set of controls while improving the performance and stability of the framework.

"Soon after the initial release of Kirigami UI, KDE's framework for convergent (mobile and desktop) user interfaces, its main developer Marco Martin started porting it from Qt Quick Controls 1 to Qt Quick Controls 2, the next generation of Qt's ready-made standard controls for Qt Quick-based user interfaces," said Thomas Pfeiffer in the announcement.

Kirigami 2's efficiency and performance saw many improvements

The port to Qt Quick Controls 2 is not the only feature that landed in this Beta release of Kirigami 2.0, as the KDE developers also managed to add many improvements to framework's efficiency and performance, as well as enhance the keyboard navigation for desktop applications.

For Android platforms, the Kirigami 2.0 Beta release introduces better Material Design integration. Other notable changes include improved activation of the Reachability & Overscroll mode and better handling of edge swipes. As expected, the Qt 5.7 GUI toolkit is now required for running Kirigami 2.0 Beta.