14 DAY TRIAL // After being in development for the past six months, KDE's Kirigami 2.0 open-source UI (User Interface) framework has been officially released in its final, production-ready state.
If memory recalls, the first public release of the Kirigami UI framework saw the light of day at the beginning of August last year, allowing early adopters to test drive KDE's brand-new tool for creating beautiful, convergent user interfaces written in Qt for both mobile and desktop applications.
A lot of effort was put into developing the first mature version of Kirigami, which entered Beta stages of development earlier this month, right after the New Year's holiday, and the team managed to quickly identify and fix all remaining blockers to be able to mark Kirigami 2.0 as ready for general use.
When the Beta of Kirigami 2.0 was announced, we told you that the UI framework was ported to the latest Qt Quick Controls 2 set of controls used for building complete user interfaces in Qt Quick, the standard library for writing QML apps. The initial version of Kirigami used Qt Quick Controls 1.
"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.
Kirigami UI 2.0 integrates better with Android's Material Design style
Apart from the Qt Quick Controls 2 port, which offers developers a much more extended range of controls, Kirigami UI 2.0 brings improved keyboard navigation for desktop apps, numerous performance and efficiency enhancements, and better integration with Android's Material Design style when developing UIs for mobile apps.
Other noteworthy improvements include better handling of edge swipes for the SwipeListItem component, improved activation of the Reachability / Overscroll mode, support for Qt 5.7 or later, and a Kirigami Gallery demo app that's available on Google Play. Watch the introductory video below for more details, and download Kirigami UI 2.0 right now from its official wiki page.
