Trolltech Releases First Qt 4 Technology Preview

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Trolltech Releases First Qt 4 Technology Preview

Posted by binner on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @09:19
from the now-don't-caring-about-bad-summer-anymore dept.
Trolltech has announced the availability of the first Qt 4 Technical Preview. Qt 4, the next major release of the popular cross-platform C++ application framework which KDE is based on, is scheduled for final release in late Q1, 2005. Read the online documentation or jump to the download page.

Five new technologies, codenamed Arthur, Scribe, Interview, Tulip, and Mainwindow are being incorporated into the next major version of Qt 4.0. The technologies are:

Arthur: The new painting framework
Scribe: The Unicode text renderer with a public API for performing low-level text layout
Interview: A model/view architecture for item views
Tulip: A new set of template container classes
Mainwindow: A modern action-based mainwindow/toolbar/menu and docking architecture

This is a preview of some of the Qt 4 libraries, not of the entire application development framework. Most notably, new versions of Qt Designer and Qt Linguist are not included. The Technology Preview is meant to be tested on a limited set of platforms only.

Qt 4 still is in a very active state of development. Not everything is ready for prime time, and there are significant omissions. Most importantly, this Technology Preview is not meant to be used in production code or even for application development. Not all backwards compatibility functionality is in place yet but you're able to write small programs.

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.

Performance ?
by MandrakeUser on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @09:37

Hi

Does anyone know how is Qt4 going to do in terms of speed ? I think I read some time ago that one of the focuses for Qt4 was to speed up the libraries, besides adding functionality, but I don't see any reference to this in the Public Release info ...

[ Reply To This | View ]

Re: Performance ? by Ben Meyer on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:05

Re: Performance ? by MandrakeUser on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:56

Re: Performance ? by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @12:07

Re: Performance ? by a.c. on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @19:33

Re: Performance ? by Mikhail Capone on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @11:53

Re: Performance ? by superstoned on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @14:19
Re: Performance ? by Thomas on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @03:35

Re: Performance ? by Jonas on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @05:08

Re: Performance ? by Paul Koshevoy on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @10:03

Re: Performance ? by thySEus on Monday 09/Aug/2004, @04:42

Re: Performance ? by AthlonRob on Friday 31/Dec/2004, @15:25

Qt 4
by AC on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @09:37

I heard that Qt 4 would be broken up so that a command-line program could link to it and not have to drag in all the GUI stuff it won't use. Is that still happening?

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Re: Qt 4 by Ben Meyer on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:04
Re: Qt 4 by kde_benutzer on Tuesday 20/Jul/2004, @10:08

can I compile kde 3.x.x against qt4
by anonymous on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:31

I think I've something about, qt4 should be compatible to qt3.

Thanks for answers!

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Re: can I compile kde 3.x.x against qt4 by Daniel Molkentin on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:37
Re: can I compile kde 3.x.x against qt4 by Fredrik Edemar on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:38
Re: can I compile kde 3.x.x against qt4 by anon on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:38
Re: can I compile kde 3.x.x against qt4 by MandrakeUser on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @10:54

What about QTopia ?
by Pupeno on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @11:14

What about QTopia... does anybody know if Qt4 will be good enough to be the base for the next QTopia ?
--
Go Qt go! :D

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Re: What about QTopia ? by zecke on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @11:25

Re: What about QTopia ? by Pupeno on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @11:29

Looks great
by tbscope on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @11:47

From reading the texts, it looks really great at the moment.

I'm especially interested in the "interview" model/view framework.
This will sure speed up programs that deal with rather large amounts of data.

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No examples, but demos
by Ben Meyer on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @11:58

The example apps have been stripped out of the preview (for size i presume), but in its place are several demos and boy are they eye candy. swirling alphablended boxes that are stretching and moving in 3d. :) yum. worth compiling just to play around with the arthur demo.

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Re: No examples, but demos by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @12:15

Re: No examples, but demos by Boudewijn Rempt on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @12:58
Re: No examples, but demos by AC on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @00:56

foreach()
by standsolid on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @13:27

has qt always had 'foreach' iterators or is this new in qt4?

I can't wait for qt4
/me drools

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Re: foreach() by Andre Somers on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @13:57

Re: foreach() by MandrakeUser on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @07:32

Re: foreach() by MandrakeUser on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @08:40

Symbol visibility patch
by Me on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @14:33

I hope they made use os gcc�s symbol visibility option in version 3.5. Then Kde will fly even more!

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Support for exceptions
by Eron Lloyd on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @14:35

Does anyone know if Trolltech is considering providing C++ exception support within Qt soon? I know I've read that it's been a vague/opinionated problem in the past (bloat/lack of compiler support), but it's not much of an issue today. Some people may disagree with exception-based error-handling but I personally love the concept, and have been spoiled coming from the Python world. It's one of the few downsides I see against using it for C++ development.

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Re: Support for exceptions by Martin Galpin on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @15:54

Re: Support for exceptions by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @18:21

Re: Support for exceptions by Sad Eagle on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @18:39
Re: Support for exceptions by David Johnson on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @18:54

Re: Support for exceptions by David Johnson on Thursday 08/Jul/2004, @19:11

Re: Support for exceptions by El Pseudonymo on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @00:54

Re: Support for exceptions by David on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @10:52

Re: Support for exceptions by M on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @05:54

Re: Support for exceptions by Dawnrider on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @07:44

Re: Support for exceptions by El Pseudonymo on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @10:13

Re: Support for exceptions by Nicolas Goutte on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @12:06

Re: Support for exceptions by El Pseudonymo on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @13:18

Re: Support for exceptions by Nicolas Goutte on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @12:32

Re: Support for exceptions by M on Sunday 11/Jul/2004, @06:42

Re: Support for exceptions by Allan S. on Sunday 11/Jul/2004, @11:19

Re: Support for exceptions by Rik Hemsley on Sunday 11/Jul/2004, @16:50

Re: Support for exceptions by Richard Garand on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @13:21

Re: Support for exceptions by Ruediger Knoerig on Monday 12/Jul/2004, @02:48

OpenGL
by Marco Bubke on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @00:13

The OpenGL Code looks really old fashion to me. Ok, VBO's are mostly don't needed, but the don't use automatic mipmap generation. glVertexi is mostly the slow path. Maybe they can change in QT5 the coordinates from integer to floats.

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Re: OpenGL by Anonymous on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @00:16

Re: OpenGL by Marco Bubke on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @00:35

Re: OpenGL by anon on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @06:27

libQtCore licensing ?
by aleXXX on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @10:44

How about LGPLing libQtCore ?
This would make Qt the first choice for system programming (libs, daemons, etc.) for any UNIX/Mac developer.

Alex

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Re: libQtCore licensing ? by Corbin on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @11:03

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by anon on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @11:33

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by Anonymous on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @12:11

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by M on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @13:42

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by Anonymous on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @14:04

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by M on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @05:29

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by aleXXX on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @02:17

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by M on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @05:39

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by aleXXX on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @06:01

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by Justin Karneges on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @10:09
Re: libQtCore licensing ? by Matthias Ettrich on Sunday 11/Jul/2004, @12:28

Re: libQtCore licensing ? by Eric Laffoon on Monday 12/Jul/2004, @08:31
Re: libQtCore licensing ? by aleXXX on Tuesday 13/Jul/2004, @10:40

First impressions
by perraw on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @15:23

I have just done "make install" and are ready to take a look at it. One thing I noticed during configure was that it required XCursor 1.0, and I had 1.1. I changed the test scripts so it would allow 1.1 as well.

The Qt Paint engine test (Arthur) for alpha blended primitives was butt slow on my machine. But I think I read somewhere that at this stage it was unaccelerated on X11. The open gl thing was fast though.

The textedit demo felt faster. A bit surprise that it doesn't select the whole word if you start at the middle (yes, like windows does) and move left/right.

Plasmatable, butt slow here. Probably 1/3 rd of the speed my i386-sx 16 did in a plasma demo :=)

Toolbar demo, sad to see that you can't have the toolbar next to the menubar like in IE on windows :( It can save you screen space.

Then I would like to see async sql queries. But I'm not sure yet if they are. Would be so cool to have a signal fire when the query is done. Sometimes sql queries take minutes before result is back....

Will give it a greater than-5-minute-spin tomorrow :)

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Re: First impressions by Matthias Ettrich on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @03:09
Re: First impressions by aleXXX on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @03:54
Re: First impressions by Asdex on Sunday 11/Jul/2004, @03:44

Initial Review of Qt 4
by Richard Moore on Friday 09/Jul/2004, @17:02

I've written my initial thoughts on Qt 4 after playing with the new code on my blog at http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/506 if anyone is interested. Rich.

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Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by aleXXX on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @04:05

Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by aleXXX on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @06:15
Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by Nicolas Goutte on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @08:54

Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by Anonymous on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @09:21

Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by Nicolas Goutte on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @10:01
Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by Matthias Ettrich on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @11:27

Re: Initial Review of Qt 4 by aleXXX on Saturday 10/Jul/2004, @12:49

Text printing & Fonts
by James Richard Tyrer on Friday 16/Jul/2004, @14:44

I read that "Laying out text using design metrics (WYSIWYG) is currently disabled".

So, does anybody know for sure if they are going to fix the font metrics issues. Also, do they know that you need to be able to select if you want something formated for screen rendering or printer rendering? Currently we have ONLY screen rendering.

It says nothing about the PostScript driver. I hope that this will be fixed. As I presume that most people know it does not get the PostScript Font names correct unless you embed the fonts. The correct way to do this is to use FontConfig & FreeType2 to get this information from the font file.

I also found that there is an inconsistency between the way that TrueType and Type1 font families are named and the current version is still confused by this. It appears that Qt is designed to work with the TrueType method. In which case, it will need to convert the Type1 family names into TrueType family names. Personally, I would like to see it the other way, but this would require rewriting some of KDE as well -- the KDE Font Selector would need more windows (2 more I think but the second one wouldn't be used much and the windows would have to interact because not every combination would be available).

And, a general solution needs to be found for the fact that not all fonts have:

<blank> | Regular | Roman, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic

And worse, some fonts have more than one weight of bold. The kludge in the current version only works for the fonts included in the PostScript driver code. If this (a table) is the solution, it needs to be in a configuration file, and we need a KDE GUI program to edit it (a KPart since the font installer would also need it and you should be able to access it from the font selector).

--
JRT

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