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!

What a year’s start! After a very packed December publishing all the QGIS on the road videos and quietly releasing QField 1.3 – Ben Nevis we could have gone and relaxed over the holidays. But since we love QField so much we immediately started working on the next iteration. Now, after an intensive testing period, we are proud to announce the release of QField 1.4 – Olavtoppen.

Olavtoppen!? yes, the highest point of Bouvet Island, the remotest island on Earth. And sure enough, QField would follow you there!

As usual, get it on play store or download it from GitHub.

QField Crowdfunding Campaign

Before digging into all the new goodness that you will find in QField 1.4, let’s get a big “Thanks” out to everybody who supported our crowdfunding campaign for improved camera support and all our customers that agreed to open source the work we did for them.

If you like QField, want a new feature or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Usability enhancements

In QField 1.2 we started to improve on the usability of the user interface. We are constantly working on this with a usability expert to get the user interface to be even more appealing and user-friendly.

Besides lots of clean-up and polishing, QField received two major improvements, a portrait mode and a new welcome screen with recent projects.

Welcome screen with recent projects

QField is all about efficiency. While favourites folders in the file selector already give a great productivity boost, very often we work with the same 3-4 projects. This is why we redesigned the welcome screen to list the last five project used. And if you look carefully you might get a hint of what will be coming soon…

Portrait mode

QField now flawlessly works in portrait mode. We heard you say you needed a comfortable way to work in portrait mode, especially on smartphones. QField forms and button placements are now optimized to be easy to use with your thumbs.

New features

We keep on listening to your feedback and prioritize new features based on it. We did implement some minor features like allowing hiding legend nodes and printing to PDF using the current extent. But this time’s superstars are three highly expected features: Splitting of geometries, compass integration and, yes you guessed right, native camera and gallery app support!

Split Features

A new editing tool is available that allows for splitting existing features. This adds an even more powerful operation to an already impressive geometry editing tools set.

Compass integration

A long-awaited feature! QField now shows you on-screen in which direction you are looking, walking, driving, flying or warping direction. This makes it much easier and more pleasant to navigate in the field.

Native Camera and Gallery

It is now possible to use your favourite camera app so that you have more control over how pictures are taken. It is also possible to select pictures which are already on your device by using the new gallery selector.

Pro Tip: You can use any camera app. For example, you can use the open camera app to create geotagged photos if your preinstalled system camera doesn’t save positioning information in EXIF data.

Pro Tip 2: You can use an image annotation app to add notes, sketches, drawings and so on to your images and then choose them from QField via the add from gallery button.

Antenna Height Correction

For high precision measurements, it’s possible to compensate your altitude by a fixed antenna height. This will then automatically adjust all the digitised altitude values.

JPEG 2000

Support for JPEG 2000 raster datasets was added. This lossy format offers a compression rate at par with proprietary formats like ECW or Mr SID.

Pro Tip: save your base maps in JPEG 2000 to save storage.

New Languages

Thanks to the hard work of our community, QField is now also available in Turkish and Japanese.

New packages

You say: wow that’s a lot! We say: there is more
We have upgraded our whole building infrastructure so that you can comfortably get even more QField goodness without having to uninstall your production ready QField.

Automated master builds

After each pull request is merged into our master code, a new package is created and automatically published on the playstore in a dedicated app called QField for QGIS – Unstable (Early Access). Installing this app will allow you to always have the latest build of QField for testing and giving feedback. On your device, this app is completely separated from the production-ready QField and has a distinctive black icon so that you do not confuse it.

Pull request builds

QField is an extremely active project, and as you see we develop multiple functionalities and fixes at the same time. If you’re particularly interested in one of this, our continuous integration fairy builds and publishes new packages automatically at each commit directly to the pull request you are interested in. To see what we are currently working on, have a look at the pull request overview page.

Experimental Windows builds

Last but definitely not least, we’ve set up an Azure CI infrastructure to build QField for windows. For now, we still consider this experimental but we already had some very successful testing. If you are interested in testing out QField for windows you can get it here, remember it is experimental so don’t use it in production yet and give us as much feedback as possible

What’s next?

As you can imagine we’ve had a very busy start of 2020, but even more is to come soon with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better. If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.