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  Qt 4.0 Beta 1 Released
Qt Posted by binner on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @04:14
from the feels-like-christmas-already dept.
Trolltech has released the first Beta version of the upcoming Qt 4.0. You can download it from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. An updated online Qt Reference Documentation is also available. The final Qt 4.0 is expected to be released in late first quarter of 2005.

There are five new technologies that are new to Qt, written specifically for Qt 4:

  • Tulip, a new set of template container classes.
  • Interview, a model/view architecture for item views.
  • Arthur, the Qt 4 painting framework.
  • Scribe, the Unicode text renderer with a public API for performing low-level text layout.
  • Mainwindow, a modern action-based mainwindow, toolbar, menu, and docking architecture.

This beta release also previews the new Qt Designer user interface design tool which is still heavily under development.

In addition, the following modules have been significantly improved since Qt 3:

  • A fully cross-platform accessibility module, with support for the emerging SP-API Unix standard in addition to Microsoft and Mac Accessibility.
  • The SQL module, which is now based on the Interview model/view framework.
  • The network module, with better support for UDP and synchronous sockets.
  • The style API, which is now decoupled from the widgets, meaning that you can draw any user interface element on any device (widget, pixmap, etc.).
  • Enhanced thread support, with signal-slot connections across threads and per-thread event loops.

Trolltech has set up a special mailing list, qt4-preview-feedback, for discussion of issues relating to the Qt 4 beta releases.



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Dublication
by Anonymous on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @05:45
Why duplicates Qt so much of what is available in the STL (eg. Tulip containers such as QList, QVector, QStack, QQueue, etc.)? I don't see any reason to do this (that is not to say that there could be no reason, but I don't see the additional benefit).
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Very cool siuff
by Alex on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @07:00
I'm especially happy about Arthur and the new Qt Designer, Trolltech is doing great work.
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Font metrics
by James Richard Tyrer on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @07:38
There are three possibilities for font metrics:

Screen display
Printer resolution (Windows emulation)
PostScript (the unhinted metrics in the font files)

The page for "Scribe" doesn't say anything about this except that WYSIWYG is Future Work.

Is there any progress with this?

Note that AFAIK, Qt 3.x supports only 'Screen display' font metrics which severely limits a wordprocessor based on it. OTOH, 'Screen display' *is* needed for computer presentations. The 'Printer resolution' font metrics are needed so that imported MS Word documents will not be reformatted.

--
JRT
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Arthur
by Paul on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @09:19
Once you build it try out the arthur example... Stunning.
Double buffering built in to all QWidgets, AA edges, alpha built into QColor.. It rocks.

Designer shocked me with the new GIMP-like interface. You can get used to it, but i'm not too impressed. What did impress me in designer is the visual connecting of signals and slots (screenie attatched).
Click to download attachment qt4visualconnecting.png
68KB (70105 bytes)
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Question regarding Qt4
by Magnus on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @10:46
Will Qt4 be able to use the cool stuff in the upcoming versions of x.org? Such as transparency or using 3d graphic cards to accelerate 2d performance?
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warez the Windows version?
by Anonymous on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @11:27
I dont get it. I have GTK2+ running on Windows right now.
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Funny how history repeats itself, indirectly
by Marc Driftmeyer on Thursday 23/Dec/2004, @11:46
I remember us at NeXT with out MVC view of computing was considered outdated.

Now if only Konqueror 3.3.2 could stop hanging on forms during editing and I just might enjoy it. Debian Sid, KDE 3.3.2. The damn thing has slowed down with each .x.x revision.

Any idea folks? Or does one have to wait until Qt4 for this crap to go away?
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Don't Upgrade youe SUSE Kernel
by gerry on Friday 24/Dec/2004, @04:24
Sorry for posting here, but a) I know some suse people hang out here and I so want to tell suse b) its more active than suse.com and c) some of you might be grateful

I klicked on suse watcher this morning to discover a kernel upgrade - and broke my kernel - it stiffs reiserfs and rendered my computer unusable. The upside is that I am back up and running having used repair to downgrade the kernel - the downside is that I am now running 3.3.0 rather than 3.3.2 and have got a lot of updating to do.
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Only Viable Option
by David on Friday 24/Dec/2004, @04:37
Qt 4 is a quality development tool, and quite frankly, when you are talking about getting people outside of the usual 'open source community' to develop for something other than Windows (Windows developers etc.) it's the only viable option in town. GTK, Mono, Java and other alternative methods of development are fine as plain open source tools, but realistically speaking, in this context they just don't cut it.

The most intersting part of Qt 4 for me is probably Interview. As someone who develops a lot of applications that have all sorts of data using different views this looks really, really good, and having native support to attach models and views (rather than all that stupid automatically generated Visual Studio .Net code) is very, very nice. Scribe looks nice, but support for things like the Open Office XML file format would be much nicer. The rest of it is just all-round better - no comments there.

Qt Designer looks a lot better these days, but I haven't tried it used it enough yet. C++ has never looked so good, but I think Trolltech need to have a serious look at higher level languages like C#, Java and above that Python and VB. If you could use Qt fully with a higher level language (yes, I know there are bindings) you could get so much done it wouldn't be believable.
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Multi-mouse-button support
by mikal on Friday 24/Dec/2004, @12:18
Do anyone know if this version implements support for mice with more than the two+scroll mouse buttons? A wishlist item on bugs.kde.org got the response it was a limitation of QT, not KDE. I'm really looking forward to using back/forward/application switcher, etc.
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