Qt Archive

"The Qt development toolkit is undergoing a major overhaul. The developers behind the project announced the availability of the Qt 5 alpha release this week. It's a key milestone on the path to the official launch of Qt 5, expected to occur later this year." The kind of stuff to read Ars for.

"Qt has reached another important evolutionary milestone today. We are very proud to announce that Qt 4.8.0 has now been released. Many people have worked long and hard to deliver Qt 4.8.0. Today that hard work reaches final release maturity, and we are celebrating! Featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized file system access, Qt 4.8.0 can be downloaded as binary or source packages."

The QT framework has become the a popular route to port several open source applications to OS/2 and eComStation. Version 4.7.3 has been ported to this platform and it is available for download; the improvement list is also available. The QT Creator IDE has also been ported.

Since Nokia announced its switch to Windows Phone 7, people have been worried about the future of Qt. Well, it turns out Nokia is still going full steam ahead with Qt, since it has just announced the plans for Qt 5. Some major changes are afoot code and functionality-wise, but the biggest change is that Qt 5 will be developed out in the open from day one (unlike Qt 4). There will be no distinction between a Nokia developer or third party developer.

Since the web has a tendency to overstate things: no, Nokia is not selling Qt. Today, Nokia announced that Digia will acquire the Qt Commercial software licensing and professional services business from Nokia. So I repeat: Nokia is not selling Qt.

A first alpha version of a Qt implementation for the Android mobile operating system has been announced by Romanian software developer Bogdan Vatra. Since Nokia in co-operation with Microsoft have announced that it does not intend to develop a Windows Phone variant of the GUI framework, Qt for Android represents the only remaining route/platfrom to providing mobile phone apps developed using Qt.

Recently a project called 'Qt Modularization' was initiated. This is a project that aims to modularize Qt at every level. As you may know already, Qt is currently modularized on the DLL level; each module has its own DLL. However, the project as a whole is still monolithic; all the code is hosted in a single repository, you cannot build a leaf module without building the modules on which it depends. This project aims to change that, so that the modules are hosted in different repositories, with separate maintainers, and modules may have different release schedules.

It's a rather unclear time over at Nokia in Espoo (Finland!), with people coming and going, and changes in development strategy. The latest one is, I think, a good one: Nokia has stated it will commit fully to Qt as the sole application development framework for both Symbian and MeeGo.

Jesse Barnes has posted a screenshot showing two clocks implemented in Qt, drawn natively in Wayland, the next-generation display server.

Been wondering about Nokia's strategy for conquering the rapidly expanding app space? Great! So were we, which is why we joined up with a recent dev event carried out by the Finnish company for an update on how and where things are going. It's a familiar narrative by this point: Qt is all set to become the way that Nokia-friendly apps are made -- whether it be for Symbian smartphones or MeeGo-powered mobile computers, coffee machines or infotainment consoles

"Being the developer of a Qt-based mobile solution is really really nice nowadays – especially as Android support is well on its way. For all those of you new to the topic: the moment Qt has been ported, you can run your Qt-based applications on the operating system. Bogdan Vatra the brain behind the Qt port - let's see what he has to say!"

Trolls (the Trolltech ones) are blogging about a technology preview of the UI designer for QML, integrated to Qt Creator. A youtube video is provided. QML, accompanied by an UI designer, provides an open alternative for piecing together flash-like high-FPS programs with heavily customized and animated user interfaces, built on QGraphicsView framework. While QML allows authoring the whole program in QML markup and Javascript, QML can be incorporated to Qt C++ programs with relative ease.

The Haiku alpha is barely out the door, and we already have another important news item about the open source reimplementation of the BeOS. About 18 months ago, Evgeny Abdraimov started porting the Qt4 graphical toolkit to Haiku, and now, we ave some seriously epic screenshots showing a multitude of Qt4 applications running in Haiku, as well as a developer preview release.

"Nokia has announced the availability of the first Qt 4.6 beta release. Version 4.6 represents a significant milestone, the first release since Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech, the company that originally created Qt. The open source C++ application development toolkit has evolved considerably under Nokia's stewardship and has undergone noteworthy technical and licensing changes."