Qt Archive

A new version of the official Qt book, "C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4", has now been published. The book is officially approved by Trolltech and has been reviewed by many Qt developers. It contains 560 pages of new and updated instructional content covering end-to-end cross-platform development.

Last week Trolltech announced the release of a technology preview of Qt 4.2, the upcoming version of the cross-platform toolkit scheduled for the 4th quarter of 2006. This release features a new framework for handling canvas items (Graphics View) and improved support for desktop integration, including dbus bindings, Glib eventloop support, switchable button order and a Clearlooks-like style.

"Yesterday, I got Qt running on top of the Glib main loop. By using the QAbstractEventDispatcher API, I was able to completely replace the entire event dispatching mechanism of a Qt 4 application with less than 600 lines of code. What does this mean?"

Trolltech has updated and renamed its graphics toolkit and development kit for embedded Linux devices. "Qtopia Core" is based on a Linux port of the company's Qt 4.0 development framework, and replaces its earlier Qt/Embedded product. It targets "single-application products" built on embedded Linux.

Trolltech has updated its software suite for Linux-based mobile phones. Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE) version 2.2 adds VoIP capabilities targeting dual-mode and "converged" devices, among other enhancements. Updated screenshot here.

Two recent articles cover the success of Trolltech and their product Qt 4, on which KDE 4 will be based. 'Trolltech: A case study in open source business' looks at the continued growth of the company based on dual licenced Free Software. The article describes what KDE and Trolltech gain from each other, including user feedback to Trolltech and sponsored developers for KDE. The Australian Computerworld declares that Qt 4 raises the bar for cross-platform app dev tools. They cover the separate modules of Qt 4 and the cross-platform quality, giving it a 9.2 out of 10 approval rating.

Benoit Schillings, co-creator of the Be operating system (first engineer employee in 1992, creator of the BeOS app_server among other things) and former CTO of Openwave, has been appointed to the newly created position of chief technology officer (CTO) at Trolltech. In the meantime, Trolltech has also joined the new mobile OSDL initiative.

Pier Luigi Fiorini is the lead developer of Mockup. Mockup is an open source effort to create a modern desktop operating system. It is based on Linux 2.6 and supports native POSIX threading, hardware detection, automatic device creation and automatic network configuration. The user interface, written using Qt 4, runs on Xorg, but will also support the framebuffer in future versions. Read on for an interview. Note that Fiorini is not a native English speaker, so forgive any spelling/grammar errors.

"Welcome to A Qt Blog. This is a blog I intend to feature announcements on developments in the Qt world: Qt itself, applications, publications, devices, as well as KDE, KDE-centred operating systems (particularly Linux distributions), and Trolltech affairs. I'd also like to have the occasional review and feature article on development and other topics."

The Qt 4 Resource Center has added a new article to the collection. This time, it shows how to intercept signals and slots using a spying class. The article also shows how to implement a custom color-picker widget with support for both RGB and HSV.

"The Code Skipper, a new free Qt community resource site has been founded to provide our community of developers with a place to meet. This is a site where tutorials and articles that can be found on a range of Qt related subjects. Skipper also contains a lot of code that can be easily integrated into your applications. Learn Qt tricks from there and share your own ideas."

The Qt 4 Resource Center has published a new article about zooming and scrolling. The zoomable picture viewer article discusses the Qt classes needed and the coding details that are dealt with.

Qt 4.0 release is on the wire. Among other things, that means the long awaited GPL-licensed Windows version is now available for download, and Qt4 is officially dual-licensed across the board. Also of note in Trolltech's announcement: integration with Visual Studio .NET; great strides in graphics, threading, footprint, and performance; and separation into Desktop, Desktop Light, and (non-GUI) Console versions.

The Qt 4 Resource Center has a look at the demonstrations and examples of Qt 4 RC 1 in a new article sprinkled with screenshots. Showing not only the different applications, but also different modes for filling, aliasing, drawing and transforming, the shots provide a good view of the next generation of Qt.