Major Upgrade Announcement

Major Upgrade Announcement

During 2022, a lot of refactoring has been done.

The final phase of this refactoring was the move of the deployment process to the Github Actions. This was done yesterday!

Thus, the DownZemAll! of 2023 will be better than 2022. It deserves a “version 3.x” to introduces this new era.

Introducing Qt6

DownZemAll! now uses Qt6 instead of Qt5. This change required many refactoring, to use the new Qt API and remove obsolete parts.

It permits to use the last C++ standard: C++20, instead of C++11.

Many other advantages of this major upgrade: simpler and more robust API, some changes with network and sockets like QWebEngine, etc. We might dream that the Gumbo Parser and other workarounds could be eventually replaced soon by native Qt6 functions.

Introducing Libtorrent-Rasterbar v2.0

In 2022, LibTorrent-Rasterbar has been also upgraded from v1.2.5 to v2.0.7.

This change was only possible because the Qt6’s compiler enables C++20.

Note: Some deprecated functions still remain temporarily, but should be removed in future releases.

Introducing Github Actions

Appveyor-CI (historical build runner for Windows targets) and Travis-CI (historical build runner for Linux targets) have been replaced both by Github Actions.

This new build runner will allow a lot of simplification and maintenance reduction.

Simplify project files

Historically, we had to maintain both CMakelists.txt and .pro/.pri, to make build possible from the QtCreator’s GUI and from the CMake command line.

Today, QtCreator is able to compile from CMakeList.txt directly, so the .pro/.pri are no longer necessary and have been removed.

A new hope for 2023

Thanks to these upgrades in 2022, 2023 looks brighter!

C++20 offers more simplification and abstraction, Qt6 offers better widgets, and LibTorrent-Rasterbar offers better functions. DownZemAll! will be improved a lot, for sure :)

Happy New Year 2023! :)

yt-dlp replacing youtube-dl

yt-dlp replacing youtube-dl

DownZemAll! now uses the library yt-dlp, which is a fork of youtube-dl.

Youtube-DL is a free and open-source command-line program to download and convert videos from YouTube.com and other video sites, but is inactive now.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Dark Mode

New Feature: Dark Mode

DownZemAll! provides a light-on-dark color scheme (also called black mode, dark mode, dark theme or night mode).

It turns the background to dark.

To try it, go to Preferences > Interface > Style and Icons.

References

• light-on-dark color scheme

Flat Design Theme

New Feature: Flat Design icons and platform style choice

Styles

DownZemAll! provides an option to change the platform style (ex: Windows, Windows Vista, Fusion, MacOS, KDE…). It turns the interface to different OS styles.

To try it, go to Preferences > Interface > Style and Icons.

Icons

Moreover, the application proposes 2 icons sets:

• Classic Design (default), the historic iconset of DZA!
• Flat Design, a more modern iconset

Flat Design icons are SVG files and come mostly from FontAwesome. A few icons are also my own creation! For the record, I used Inkscape to draw them.

Screenshots

Windows Vista, 98 and Fusion styles:

Download Urls: copy-paste a list of URLs to download

New Feature: Download Urls

From now on, DownZemAll! can download a list of Urls.

Just copy-paste the list of URLs to download in the dialog:

Note that:

• the text editor is tolerant to extra spaces and extra lines (DZA! will not download empty lines!)
• There’s the “Block” edition mode, which allows to change several lines in a row.
• Obviously there are the copy, paste, cut, undo, redo things.

“Block” Mode:

Last but not the least, do not hesitate to compliment the icon (I did it myself with Paint.NET…).