In the past there were two versions of LabPlot. The first one was based on Qt4 and KDE4 libraries. The second one uses Qt 5 and KDE frameworks 5. The development was done mainly in the Qt4-based branch which was merged from time to time to the Qt5/frameworks branch where the porting to Qt5/frameworks, if required, was done after the merge. Clearly, this caused a lot of additional work, was very time consuming sometimes and distracted us too often from the actual development – the development mostly done in our very limited spare time.

After long internal discussions we decided to stop developing and releasing the Qt4-version of LabPlot. It should be an exception nowadays to find a distribution without a reasonable support for Qt5 and KDE frameworks. So, starting from the next release, LabPlot 2.5, there will only be the Qt5/kf5-based release. We still can decide to provide fixes to the Qt4-based version, but there definitely won’t be any new features for this release anymore.

Working on one release only will allow us to concentrate more on the application itself and to increase the development speed. Our master branch is now on Qt5/frameworks since couple of weeks already with a lot of great new stuff being developed for the next release.

Having mentioned the next release, couple of words more about this. We plan to release closer to the end of this year. A lot of new features are already developed for the next release. Among them we want to mention the import of data from SQL databases as well as the import of Origin’s project files. Data fitting has got a lot of attention recently and the next release will allow the user to do more advanced fitting and to obtain much better representation of the results of the fitting procedure. Also, we improved a lot the user experience – the creation of multiple plots and data curves as well as performing of data analysis can be carried out more comfortable now and we’ll improve more in this direction soon. More on the new features will come in the next couple of blogs.

LabPlot’s GSoC2017 project makes also good progress and if everything goes well and as expected, the next release of LabPlot will provide support for live data coming from usual files, pipes, sockets and serial port.

Still, a lot of polishment has to be done until the release. Everybody who is interested in testing the new features, please don’t hesitate to build the current version of LabPlot from sources and to provide some feedback!