Geomagic

Geomagic, Inc. is a worldwide software and services company headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, with subsidiaries in Europe and Asia and distributors worldwide. More than 5,000 professionals in industries such as automotive, aerospace, medical devices and consumer products use Geomagic software and services.

The Challenge
Geomagic had been supporting two separate GUI code bases for its initial two operating systems: IRIX and Win32. This was not only time consuming to maintain, but the two code bases were prone to bugs and inconsistent behavior. Geomagic set out to develop a cross-platform solution that would enable it to build a GUI controlled by generic code.

The Solution
The company found the development platform it needed in Qt. To test Qt, Geomagic first built a prototype of its application under IRIX, then had one of its developers get the application working under Win32. They realized they had achieved their goal when they ran the application for the first time and it came up looking and behaving just like a Win32 application. With the success of the cross-platform functionality established, Geomagic was able to expand its development to Solaris and Linux environments as well.

The Value
Qt freed Geomagic’s Win32 developers to work on other projects, making better use of its resources and providing greater opportunities for product enhancement. Additionally, Qt saved development costs and – thanks to its cross-platform functionality – made it possible for Geomagic to reach a wider target market.

“Qt has cut down a huge part of our QA process and decreased the number of functionality inconsistencies. It was also beneficial because it freed up a lot of resources.” -  Ping Fu, CTO, Geomagic.

geomagic Screenshot