Qt Archive

Digia has announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Digia has sent a letter to the KDE team that it intends to pretty much continue what Trolltech and Nokia built up, so not a whole lot ought to change for KDE - luckily.

"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.

"I'm happy to announce that the Qt Project officially went live today. Starting today, development of Qt will be governed as a true open source project. We now have qt-project.org - a website where all development of Qt will be centered, providing the same infrastructure and processes for everybody that wants to contribute to Qt."

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.

When Microsoft and Nokia announced Nokia's move to Windows Phone 7, most people assumed the worst for Nokia's stewardship of the open source Qt, and indeed the company quickly sold its Qt licensing interests to Digia. But it looks like the company still has plans for Qt - and for the Symbian OS. Aaron Seigo, a Qt hacker employed by Nokia, told blogger Brian Proffitt that "Nokia is predicting over 150 million Symbian devices still to come" and "I think they've underestimated the longevity of Symbian".

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.

With the news that Nokia is choosing Windows Phone 7 as its main smart phone platform, there has been some doubts concerning its commitment towards Qt and Meego. On the QT blog, Nokia's Director of Qt ecosystem discusses its future. Nokia re-affirms it's committed to Qt, and also says it will be launching a Meego device later this year. Nokia after all is not the only company with an interest in this platform and tablets from other companies like Fujitsu is already starting to emerge.

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.

After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time. Although it's a little more than nine months since Qt's last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, Qt Quick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released

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

Piggybacking on the N8 launch, Nokia provided the first public release of the Nokia Qt SDK (beta). In essence, this product is the Qt Creator 2.0 (with the usual support for desktop development), enhanced with features necessary for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo development: easy hardware debugging, as well as a simulator that mocks screen size and various hardware events like location changes.

"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!"

Nokia has released the latest version of its cross-platform toolkit Qt, version 4.6. As usual, it comes with a whole slew of improvements and new features, and this time, they even added a new platform into the mix.

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.