I’m happy to announce that Qt 5.6.0 has been released today! This release has taken a bit longer to finish than we originally expected, mostly because we put a lot of new infrastructure in place, allowing us to make Qt 5.6 a Long Term Supported (LTS) release. With that, Qt 5.6 (LTS) will be receiving patch releases with security updates and bug fixes for the next three years, in parallel to upcoming Qt versions.
I have 100% no idea what Qt is!
Even their web page doesn’t say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28software%29
Maybe you should have tried harder..
I shouldn’t have to…
Actually, you should. This is a tech website, and I expect our readers to know what Qt is. This isn’t The Verge (with all due respect to The Verge).
You are still quite young aren’t you?
When you get a little older, you’ll realise that:
A) No one knows everything.
B) Any News release should be informative and is an opportunity to gain free publicity. You can’t do that if the article doesn’t mention what it does.
Cheers.
You’re obviously trolling, but come on. The link I gave you was literally the “I’m feeling lucky” result from Google.
As Thom already explained, this is a tech site. Every article doesn’t start out explaining that Windows is an operating system for IBM PC compatible machines. That Apple is a tech company with its HQ in California. Or that iOS is the operating system driving the iPhone (which is a phone, the successor of the telegraph), iPad (which is a tablet, which is a computer with a display shaped like a book), the Apple TV (which is a box sending signals to the TV) and the Apple Watch (which is a computer you wrap around your wrist). How dumbed down must it be before we draw the line?
I’m sorry, but when you referenced the iPhone, you didn’t adequately describe what a telegraph is.
The very first words on the QT home page are:
Are you not familiar with cross-platform development frameworks, perhaps?
I love Qt, but I have to admit those first lines don’t actually tell you what Qt actually is – a collection of C++ libraries that are well integrated and comes with an IDE.
That could be anything….software, hardware, fruit scones?
I kind of agree with you. Not so hard to state somewhere that Qt is a C++ library for cross-platform development of GUI applications. Well, maybe better formulated 🙂
Qt does a lot more than GUI applications, though that is what it is most well known for.
It runs stuff without GUIs regularly and spans from embedded to full scale distributed systems, with functionality for servers, RESTful APIs, and more.
So no, I wouldn’t say “cross-platform development of GUI application”, but rather “cross-platform development of applications” with support for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, and more.
Essentially it is a C++ library and if you do not already know that, it takes you quite a while to find out on their web site, which is laden with marketing bullshit and does not really get to the point.
Probably because they try to make a big fuss about something that is, well, just a C++ library.
I’ve been working with Qt for quite a while now, and it’s blatant that it’s C++; the primary resource on the website for devs is the documentation and forums – both of which are easy to get to and find.
But yes, it’s a series of C++ libraries (about 10-15 libraries) that are quite mature, well written, and very platform independent enabling all kinds of cool things – from GUIs to services, on numerous platforms.
The marketing is there in part because there is also the commercial edition and a heavy focus on supporting commercial developers – even if they use the open source edition. It’s probably one of the most mature communities in that respect.
Actually, imho, GUIs are the thing QT does the least well. Its other libraries–network, xml, etc–integrate much better with their target platforms. The GUI library never acts native on any platform you run it on save KDE and does not integrate properly with most target platforms’ messaging, event, and accessibility libraries among others. It has gotten better in recent years at integration, but still has a long way to go. GUI libraries such as SWT and WX do a far better job of integrating with the native GUIs of various platforms, however GUIs are all that they cover.
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Wow…16 comments and not a single one about the actual release :p
Personally I find the LTS concept pretty interesting.