Happy Holidays! Today we release the Qt 4.8 libraries for those of you that target Windows, Mac and Linux/X11. The stand-alone download of the Qt 4.8 libraries will be followed, in January, by a full Qt SDK update including the updated Qt 4.8 libraries as well as further improved Symbian and Nokia N9 targets based upon Qt 4.7.4. So for those of you that appreciate a nice packaged SDK or target “only” Nokia Symbian and Nokia N9, we recommend you wait for the full Qt SDK 1.2 release in January 2012.
For those using Qt for desktop and embedded Windows, Mac and Linux/X11 who want to get Qt 4.8 and start using it now – download it here.
In Qt 4.8 we focused on increasing quality and making it easier to create applications with improved performance. Qt 4.8 is an important step towards the Qt 5.0 release planned for 2012. We introduce Qt Platform Abstraction, one of the main architectural renewals in Qt 5 as well as we will move Qt 4.8 to the Qt project so it will be easier to make code contributions to Qt 4.8 by using Gerrit.
A few highlights with Qt 4.8 versus 4.7 are:
The Qt Platform Abstraction (the outcome of the lighthouse project) provides you with a clean abstraction layer that makes it easier to port QtGui to new windowing systems. The new RIM QNX / blackberry tablet project, as shown at Qt Developer Days is a good example of this at work, as is the Qt port for Android
Qt Quick improvements Qt 4.8 speeds up Qt Quick UI design and app development with ready-made components and features such as Right-To-Left support, Support for split-screen virtual keyboard as well as a pinch area to provide a declarative API for handling touch input. In addition there is also the possibility to embed OpenGL shader effects in Qt Quick apps with the help of a QML shader add-on.
Qt WebKit 2.2.1. The Qt 4.8 release features an updated version of QtWebKit from the WebKit project, including a wide range of improvements to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies.
Threaded Open GL in Qt 4.8 makes it much easier, and more thread safe, to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently (and avoid the main thread being blocked while the GPU is doing its thing)
Inspired by what I saw in China, I also want to draw attention to the ongoing (early pre-work) on Qt 3D for Qt5. It offers the possibility to create and destroy arbitrary 3D items on-the-fly. The module in use was shown by multiple developers at our Beijing event, which incidentally was the most populated Qt Developer Conference through the history – a really engaged crowd of close to 1100 developers.
I am now looking forward to the Tokyo leg of our Asia event tour, which will be our largest Qt developer conference ever staged in Japan.
The technical details related to the blog can be found on: Qt Labs 4.8 blog by Sinan Tanilkan. Enjoy!
Daniel Kihlberg
Global Director Qt Ecosystem
Nokia, Qt Developer Relations Team
{ 10 comments }
http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2011-December/000908.html
“So now there is total of 108 improvements and bug fixes available in Qt Commercial 4.8.0 that are not part of the LGPL release. I want to underline that this is not the intended way of differentiating our offering.”
Maybe true, but hard to believe.
Unfortunately, I do not have the opportunity to participate in Beijing ‘s Qt development on the General Assembly.
With 108+ improvements in the commercial version, that are not backported to lgpl version, I think that there should at least include a listing of what changed, to see if it is even worth moving from 4.74 to 4.8 in the near future.
Of course, we should consider a long term stable version, as being a desireable outcome of upgrading and perhaps 5.0 is that version. Should we wait?
I am happy for the changes, and at the same time disappointed that the 108 enhancements were not listed by source or library file name.
You guys have a serious marketing / PR problem.
The only thing I ever hear from Qt is how it will probably become a dead project when nokia goes under due to not being relevant anymore in the cellular market.
I haven been developing cross-platform applications for a long time using c++ and wx. Yesterday I tried qt creator and was shocked on what I’ve been missing out on.
The qt development tools are the best out there.
I had to find out about this through a comment on slashdot, and I do read a lot of development blogs and tech news.
(I was very aware of Qt of course, and had tried it in the past, but did not know about the tools that exist).
It is beyond my understanding how such a good tool has received such little press.
Please, for the sake of the survival of these wonderful free tools and this wonderful set of libraries, DO MORE MARKETING.
Qt Creator has a learning curve and sometimes qmake does not compile if 2 files have the same name in the source tree. Qt Everywhere Meetup in Brisbane is no good as no-one turned up in 19 August 2011.
Awesome!!!
Does the 4.8 include finally the long-awaited Mac AppStore fix, pls?
@jns: Yes, there has been several self-proclaimed prophets dooming Qt to be dead, without checking the source as you did. When checking the source, you’ll find facts that Qt is not only living. It’s even better than you experienced, having more users than ever before.
QML, the launch of Open Governance, having more platform ports than ever with Qt on QNX and Android — shows that Qt is stronger and healthier than ever. It’s 10 times more Qt apps on Symbian than a year ago, providing 20 times more revenue. It’s more than 10 million downloads from the Nokia’s app store a day. If you don’t care about phones, Qt is strong in 70 different industries, with aviation as one such industry. Panasonic Avionics Inflight Entertainment shows how they are using Qt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfyptGmX93U
Why don’t the self-proclaimed prophets check out the above facts, such as the Qt story at Panasonic Avionics? In media and online forums, disregarding facts is a part of the business. Bad news are selling so well that the facts must not stand in the way of a speculative story. That’s why serious journalists say: Checking your source is the best way of killing a good story.
Further, there is as much attention in refuting a speculative stories with facts at a later stage. For those who live by the “logic” of getting more attention, it’s more “efficient” to tell a speculative story, and later refute it with facts. Fact-avoiding attention seeker gets two stories for the price of nothing.
So why don’t we get our story out, even if we are contacting the press as much as we can? Well, we are sitting out the cold winter storm provided by self-proclaimed prophets who blows away our info. We know that a lovely spring is waiting around the corner, with journalists willing to refute speculative stories with facts … In the mean time, you can continue follow our blogs, downloading Qt updates, getting Qt facts straight from the source.
I feel just like JNS. The tools are top notch and as a cross-platform developer, I find the look and feel superior to wx. Additionally, the OpenGL support is superb. Nokia (QT) has a US/EU image problem that probably should be dealt with by a professional PR firm. There is no reason that QT doesn’t become the de facto standard for cross-platform C++ since it’s only competitors are either based on Java (Eclipse and Netbeans) or not as full featured (CODE Blocks).
Come on guys, where is the QtSDK update?
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