Get fieldwork smoothly and nimbly done despite the ice and snow outside. Collect accurate data with freehand digitizing and improved form widgets, use the data from your external GNSS receivers without any third-party apps and enjoy the pleasant usability of QField 1.8 Selma.

This year started off hi-speed for us. There’s been already a lot of coding, designing and teaching, and we’ve thrown ourselves into these things we love to do. And we published another QField release last week that I completely forgot to announce in this blog. But here it is. It’s QField 1.8, Selma. And it’s packed with cool features.

Let’s have a look.

Freehand drawing

This might be a feature that brings a lot of fun and professionalism to your work. The freehand digitizing mode allows the user to “draw” lines and polygons with the stylus pen. The mode is available for adding line/polygon features as well as for the ring tool of the geometry editor.

Together with the powerful options in the topological editing where you can snap to existing features and avoid overlaps, it’s very convenient to digitize complex shapes.

Zoom in and out

Speaking of fun. One day, a guy from the QGIS community asked us if we could implement the functionality to zoom in and zoom out like he is able to do with an app called Maps from a company named Google. I didn’t know what he meant, but he explained: Single finger double tap-and-hold zoom gesture (which allows you to zoom smoothly from anywhere on the screen). Wow! Didn’t know it before, but it’s super neat! So we made it available in QField as well.

If you are used to it, it’s quite easy. But for beginners it can be a bit difficult. So for people who are not that deft – and to keep the UX self-explanatory and simple – we also added two buttons + / – to zoom in and zoom out with just one finger. So now even a clumsy pirate with a hook instead of a hand can collect data with QField

Powerful Relation Reference Widget

Let’s be a little bit more serious and talk about how powerful the relation reference widget has become.

View and Edit selected feature

The intuitive eye icon next to the widget lets you open the form of the referenced parent feature to view and edit it.

Autocomplete mode

When auto-complete is enabled, you can easily perform a search in all available parent features.

With space-separated input, you can search for the beginning of multiple words in the display name of the parent features. So in this example searching for “Ma” will find the name “Mae” and “Marie” and using the second word “buck” it finds the Buckfast bees – so the entries containing both values will be listed on top.

Integration of external GNSS receivers

In case you wondered, why we did not release 1.8 Selma earlier? Because we wanted to have it feature loaded and rocket proof. And one of this cool feature is the integration of external GNSS receivers.

QField can receive and decode NMEA sentences received via Bluetooth from an external GNSS receiver (such as an EMLID Reach RS2) without the need for any third party app.

Search for paired Bluetooth devices in the device settings, connect to the external device and receive the GNSS information.

Select vertical grid shift files

In the QField settings, you can select a grid file on your mobile device by placing it in a directory named QField/proj in the main folder of the internal storage to increase the vertical location accuracy.

Postgres Config File

If you once started using PostgreSQL configuration files, you don’t want to live without them anymore. And when you use it on your PC, I’m sure you want to use it on your mobile device as well.

Define Postgresql services in a pg_service.conf file and use it on QField by placing it directly in a directory named QField in the main folder of the internal storage.

Add reload data button

The layer properties have been polished and in addition, you will find a button to reload the layer data. This is especially useful if you use WFS layers from which you need to get updates.

Register extra fonts

Also, you can add TTF and OTF font files into a directory named QField/fonts at the main folder of the internal storage to use the nice fonts you like.

How beautiful is that!

Support of new raster file formats

By the way: Many new raster file formats are supported – most notably COG. While not yet supported as remote format streamed directly from the web, it is also a high performance format if used locally

What about the cloud?

You might be one of these people eagerly waiting and always receiving the same message: Keep calm, it’s coming soon. Sorry for that. But when we do something, we do it right. And we prefer to have a stable solution than to publish half baked stuff. We are still highly busy coding, testing and promoting QFieldCloud. It’s announced for this spring / early summer.

Also, keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis and @QFieldCloud twitter accounts to stay updated.

We our Beta Testers

The Beta Testers are our secret heroes. They report bugs and inconveniences before the normal users are bothered with them. Thanks to the Beta Testers QField is so stable. And at this point we would like to say: Thank you, test heroes!

And what do the beta testers get in return? Well, they can be the very first to try out the great new features. This is exciting and fun. So don’t hesitate. Join the beta.

In the Play Store you should find this section under the “QField for QGIS” app listing. Enjoy the feature frenzy and report the problems at qfield.org/issues

And if you wondered…

… why this release is called “Selma”. It’s of course because of the Mount Selma in Australia… And because it’s the name of my beloved cat. That’s her – Selma Eulenkopf – staring at me while I’m coding QField.

Be ready for the cold weather with a smooth coordinate search, filters in the value relation widget, fancy new QML and HTML widgets, enhanced geometry editing functionalities and an expandable legend. Right when Autumn starts, QField 1.7 Rockies hits the stage.

As usual get it now on the play store or on github!

The days are getting shorter and the wind blows colder. It’s always good to be in a good company outside while getting your mapping work done. QField will be your reliable companion.

We know, QField 1.6 Qinling has only been out two months and with its amount of new features and stability improvements, it would have deserved a longer primetime. But we just couldn’t withhold you all the new great stuff we’ve been building lately.

So let’s welcome QField 1.7 Rockies. And yes, we mean THE Rockies, where QField is looking for plenty of new buddies.

Let’s have a look.

Merging features

Splitting of a feature has been possible for quite some time. Now the merging of features of multipolygon-layer is possible as well. Select them and merge them – easy like that. The first selected feature gets the new geometry and keeps its attributes.

Filters in the Value Relation Widget

The value relation widgets provide an easy selection of a related feature. Often it’s used for lookup tables but sometimes the related tables contain a lot of entries and the list of the possible values is long.

Using filters in the value relation drop-down can increase the efficiency in selecting the correct value. It can be configured by expressions in QGIS, so it’s possible to have the content of the drop down depend on the values entered previously in other fields.

In the screenshot above there is a Map Value Widget with “forest” and “meadow” as values. On selecting “forest”, only the trees appear in the Field “Plant Species”. On selecting “meadow” there would be listed flowers instead.

Go to coordinates in the Search

The search has not only been improved in its appearance, but it’s handling is much more comfortable with a button to clear the text and easy opening and closing.

Additionally, we added the possibility to jump to coordinates. Searching a place you know the coordinates of is now super simple. And this means that digitizing that precise geometry with known coordinates is finally possible.

QML and HTML Widget

You might remember when we introduced the QML widget in QGIS. Now it’s in QField as well. And it’s not alone. HTML widgets are supported too.

This provides a lot of possibilities to display information with texts, images and charts and it even allows you interaction.
Do you need help setting up complex forms? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

Expandable legend icons

The legend items are now expandable and collapsible.

Wait a minute… Wasn’t this possible before? Yes. It was possible in earlier versions. But why it’s announced here as a new feature?

Because now it is built in a future proof manner thanks to all the people and organisations who care for QField and bought a support contract with the sustainability initiative or committed to a recurring sponsorship.

Some technical background: As you may be aware QField uses QGIS under the hood and QGIS uses Qt under the hood. Qt is currently used in version 5. Qt 5 is not that young any more and has a lot of functionality which is no longer supported by Qt. The old legend was based on the tree view, a deprecated module. Using it had some implications like the suboptimal support of HiDPI. Furthermore, these deprecated modules will disappear in the soon-to-come Qt 6.

As you can see, keeping QField at the quality we and you expect requires a lot of maintenance work. It is of utmost importance and only possible thanks to sponsoring since paying for fixing already existing features is less attractive for most people.

What will the future bring

In the last weeks, we have been highly busy on coding, testing and promoting QFieldCloud and we are very happy to be able to announce it very soon. So be prepared.

Also, keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis and @QFieldCloud twitter accounts to stay updated.

Open Source

QField is an open source project. This means that whatever is produced is available free of charge. To anyone. Forever. This also means that everyone has the chance to contribute. You can write code, but you don’t need to. You can also help translating the app to your language or help out writing documentation or case studies or by sponsoring a new feature.

And now…

… enjoy QField 1.7 Rockies and have a nice autumn!

Editing multiple features at the same time, support for stylus pens, dynamic configuration of image names and much more.
QField 1.6 Qinling 秦岭 comes packed with awesome new features and an improved user experience.

We have been very busy over the last few months working on a new and shiny QField release. We have added many new features that increase efficiency on the field or allow for new workflows. In parallel, we have also been working on ironing out a series of issues and improving the overall user experience to make the app as pleasurable to use as possible. The result is QField 1.6 which has been published now.

Enough of the highlevel talking, let’s see what has been done.

Multi editing

Do you recall Geography lesson 101, Toblers first law? Everything is related to everything else. But near things are more related than distant things.

Very often there are similar objects nearby which share a property, tree species tend to group, human created objects like street light types or street paint markings tend to be of the same type at the same location.

With QField 1.6 it is now much easier to select a couple of features and change an attribute with very few taps. Identify a feature, long press an identify results, select more features and click the edit attributes button.

Stylus support

Sometimes it is just too cold to be working with fingers (although of course you can get capacitive gloves too). Or you just prefer to be working with a pen. QField 1.6 comes with support for stylus pens. If your device ships with one, give it a try.

Lock geometries

For some scenarios, especially in asset management, you only need to change attributes of existing objects and never add new features, delete features or change geometries. This can be configured through QFieldSync and set in the layer properties.

Image name configuration

Did you ever want to have the file names of your pictures to match the feature id, the layer name or any free text? The expression based configuration in QFieldSync offers now complete freedom in naming your images.

Legend and UX and legacy code

Didn’t expect to read UX and legacy code in one single title?

QML is the technology on which the QField user interface is built. QML ships a lot of user interface elements in a library called “Quick Controls”. A long time ago already it received an update from version 1 to version 2. Up to recently we still have been using some elements from version 1, which had an effect on high resolution displays not being able to properly display everything. To workaround that we introduced a lot of band aids, to improve the situation. We are very happy, that by migrating the legend and few other remaining elements to Quick Controls 2 in version 1.6, we have been able to completely drop this code.

Topological editing

QGIS can detect shared boundary by the features, so you only have to move a common vertex once, and QGIS will take care of updating the neighboring ones. So does his little college QField since this release.

Fast editing mode

For the real adventurers who know what they are doing this release brings the fast editing mode. In this mode, the features will automatically be stored on every change. The user interface is lighter and it combines perfectly with the topological editing.

Unter the hood

We have brought the whole technology stack up to speed with modern requirements. Proj and GDAL have been updated to recent versions. This helped to mitigate a couple of issues with coordinate transformations that were completely misplaced. It also paves the path for a future with datum corrections and always more important high precision measurements.

Known Issues

Unfortunately, we are experiencing a crash on startup with 32 bit devices. These devices are not that common any more, but if you have a device that is already a couple of years old it’s very well possible that it comes with a 32 bit cpu builtin. Despite the team’s hard efforts to isolate the reason, we were not able to find out what it was yet. Because of this we will not be able to update to 1.6 for these devices at the moment. We still hope that we will find a solution for this but don’t know yet when this will be.

We have updated proj to version 6. This brings plenty of bug fixes with coordinate handling. Among other things it adds support for using datum grids (gsb files) for very precise transformations, it is not yet possible to install those on the device. You will get an information message in the about dialog if your project happens to fall into this category. In this case, as a workaround switch the CRS of the project to a CRS with a known conversion that works without grid files.

What will the future bring

You guessed it already, we are not tired and have plenty of things stacked for the future. Prepare for more exciting updates for attribute forms and also for QFieldCloud which is right now being tested in our R&D labs.

Also keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis Twitter account to stay updated.

Open Source

QField is an open source project. This means that whatever is produced is available free of charge. To anyone. Forever. This also means that everyone has the chance to contribute. You can write code, but you don’t need to. You can also help translating the app to your language or help out writing documentation or case studies or by sponsoring a new feature.

Thanks to sponsors

Various organisations have helped to make this new release become a reality. Without the support of people in organisations who believe in the future of QField and open source tool for geospatial in general. The whole team behind QField would like to thank you with a big applause!