A first release candidate of version 4.4 of Qt, the cross-platform C++ development toolkit, was released today. Thiago Macieira says that this is considered release quality and good enough to use for most tasks. Major new features include support for Windows CE, a WebKit-based HTML rendering module (WebKit is based on KHTML and used in Safari), a Phonon-based multimedia module, XQuery 1.0 (and thus XPath 2.0) support in XML, a concurrency framework allowing multi-threading without the mutexes needed previously, and a new help system. Downloads are available (source, Windows and Mac installers) from Trolltech.

The SkyOS team has released build 6915. "This build features the complete new software store as well as the new viewer supporting location favorites and a query panel. Additionally the new C++ API got a lot of new features like Job support, HTTP download, etc. Just take a loot at this video to see the new features in action."

"Testing 64-bit performance is still a somewhat dicey proposition. Major benchmarks are either lacking, or don't work properly. For example, SYSmark 2007 simply doesn't run on a 64-bit OS (Vista or XP). And while there's now a 3ds Max 9 SPECapc benchmark, the benchmark crashes consistently with a scripting error before it completes when running on 3ds Max 9 64-bit under Vista 64-bit. On the other hand, there are more 64-bit applications and benchmarks now. That system-sapping game, Crysis, ships with a 64-bit client. 3ds Max 9, Lightwave 9, POV-Ray, and the Cinebench rendering benchmark all have 64-bit versions. Futuremark's PCMark Vantage offers a 64-bit version of that Vista-centric, synthetic test. On top of that, anyone using 64-bit Vista will still be running a lot of 32-bit applications. So we benchmarked some of those as well. Let's take a look at the benchmarks and test system."

"The next security and maintenance release for Apple's Leopard operating system could arrive sooner than later if the company maintains its current cadence, which has seen two successive pre-release builds land in the hands of developers in just five days. On the heels of the first external test build labeled Mac OS X 10.5.3 build 9D10 and released privately late last week, the Mac maker on Tuesday followed up with build 9D11, which adds nearly 20 more fixes and code corrections, bringing the new total expected with software's release to nearly 100."

From a Microsoft press release: "AT&T will become the first company in the world to bring Microsoft Surface to life in a retail environment, giving customers the ability to explore their mobile worlds using touch and device recognition technology. Microsoft Surface is the first commercially available surface computer from Microsoft. Beginning April 17, customers can experience Microsoft Surface in select AT&T retail locations, including stores in New York City, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco. Based on the success and learning from these initial pilot deployments, plans for further expansion across AT&T's 2200 US retail stores will be determined."

"Microsoft's embattled Office Open XML document format received ISO fast-track approval after receiving support from approximately 86 percent of the national bodies that participated in the vote. ISO approval will be broadly perceived as a sign of validation for the document format which has received widespread criticism from technical experts and standards advocacy groups."

MorphOS 2.0 got an official release date estimation now. According to the news section at the official MorphOS site a public release is estimated for Q2/2008. This release will support at least all computers by Genesi, such as the Pegasos 1 & 2, as well as the Efika.

"What do you do if your flagship operating system isn't designed to run well on a popular new class of hardware? It's a problem currently faced by Microsoft. Budget laptops like the Asus Eee PC with minimal amounts of RAM, relatively slow CPUs, and solid state storage have proven popular, and Vista wasn't designed to operate well within such hardware confines. In response, Microsoft is reportedly planning to extend the availability of Windows XP for the budget laptop category."

Comic: "Fools".

The Haiku project has reached a very important milestone. Bruno G. Albuquerque (bga) wrote the following note attached to a commit a few moments ago: "vnode_path_to_vnode() now returns B_NOT_A_DIRECTORY instead of B_NOT_ALLOWED as expected by POSIX programs. This allowed me to compile Haiku under itself without any hacks at all, so I guess this means that now we are officially self-hosting!" The official announcement can be found in the mailing list. In addition, there's a new Haiku alpha 1 status update.

Epiphany, GNOME's web browser, will drop support for the Gecko engine, focusing on WebKit instead. "we will choose only one web engine back-end to support and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all back-ends support. This single back-end will be WebKit." Assuming this is not an April Fool's joke, that is. Seriously, we ought to just shut down teh intertubes every April 1st. It's getting out of hand.

"Windows' enterprise adoption declined in 2007, with the gains going to Linux and Mac OS. Vista is a bust. Forrester published the data on Thursday, but only released it publicly today. Forrester surveyed a whopping 50,000 users at 2,300-plus large to very large enterprises throughout 2007. Windows' enterprise adoption declined 3.7 percent, going from 98.6 percent in January to 94.9 percent in December. Mac OS gained 3 percent, going from 1.2 percent to 4.2 percent in the same time frame. Linux gained 0.5 percent in 2007." A classic case of 'do with it as you please'.

Ars reviews GNOME 2.22, and concludes: "In version 2.22 GNOME continues to provide a high level of performance, functionality, and ease of use that contributes significantly to the viability of Linux on the desktop. Despite the numerous advances that are being made in GNOME technologies, there are still a few notable places where GNOME falls short of both open and proprietary competitors. GNOME application file dialogs, for instance, still lack basic support for file management operations such as rename and delete and don't provide support for viewing multiple file thumbnails."

Nvidia was cited as causing nearly 30 percent of early Vista crashes, while Microsoft itself was to blame for nearly 18 percent. Intel and ATI each accounted for about 9 percent of crashes, according to the documents in the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit.