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  Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0
Qt Posted by binner on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @03:13
from the let's-do-the-Qt4-dance dept.
Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4.

Unlike previous Qt releases, Qt 4 is a collection of smaller libraries which also allowed the restructuring of commercial offers into Qt Console for non-GUI development, Qt Desktop Light replacing the Professional and Qt Desktop comparable to Enterprise editions.

There are five new technologies that are new within 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.

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.
  • A new resource system for embedding images and other resource files into the application executable.

The Qt Designer user interface design tool has been rewritten as a collection of interchangeable components. It now features support for MDI and SDI modes and supports custom widgets. The project editor and the code editor have been dropped.

Qt 3 based applications have to be ported to be able to run with Qt 4. A porting guide, a porting tool as well as a Qt3Support library for obsolete classes are provided. Trolltech aims to maintain the Qt3Support Library for the lifetime of the Qt 4 series, and will also support the Qt 3 series for a minimum of two years beyond the release of Qt 4.

Some known issues are listed which are expected to be fixed in upcoming maintenance releases of Qt 4.0. Qt 4.1 will features certain advanced Qt 3 features rewritten for Qt 4 which are now only available in the Qt 3 support library (eg. Qt 3 canvas, Qt 3 syntax highlighter). It is planned be released late in 2005.



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
KDE SVN branch working with QT 4
by efegea on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @06:02
(...) Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4 (...)

Is there any documentation or how-to about how can I compile and test that?
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Thanks
by Henrique Marks on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @06:30
Many thanks for not being musicians. It was the first time in my life that i used remove file from inside amarok, instead of remove from playlist. The song is terrible. But i know that bad advertising is good, so everyone who read this will try the song anyway.

PS: Thanks for Qt. But for this i have no words.
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Congratulations!
by cartman on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @06:45
Congratulation for the Qt4 release and the video rocks! :)
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Torrents!
by Anonymous on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @07:24
http://www.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-x11-opensource-desktop-4.0.0.tar.bz2.torrent
http://www.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-win-opensource-desktop-4.0.0.mingw.exe.torrent http://www.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-win-opensource-desktop-4.0.0.zip.torrent http://www.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-mac-opensource-desktop-4.0.0.tar.gz.torrent
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Public Bug Tracker
by binner on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @08:00
Small addition, Trolltech has now a public bug tracker: http://www.trolltech.com/developer/tasktracker.html
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Just wondering
by LuckySandal on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @08:08
Any possibility that the new low-level style API will help spur development of a common widget set / backend for Qt & Gtk on freedesktop.org? Linux is in real need for a standard GUI, and having one would allow GNOME and KDE to work closer together, always a good thing!
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oooh yeah...
by ac on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @08:21
common do the Qt4 dance...

NO
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Very funny video
by melenas on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @08:23
The song is great and the video is very funny, but in mov format kaffeine fails (extrange when I could watch other files in mov format), so I encoded to MPEG4 and mp3.

Could I made a mirror of this video and mp3 on my own server? or there is any copyright restriction?

By the way, Qt4 looks nice :-)
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Hopes for Adobe & its reader
by charles on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @08:34
With the release of QT4, I hope Adobe will now quickly work on, and release its reader based on QT4. Adobe's newest reader (ver. 7.0) for Linux sucks in the file-save or file-open dialog to say the least. Besides, I think that for those having nothing like *GTK* but a KDE environment, the reader will load faster than the current GTK based one.
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A Very Good Move to GPL
by fast_rizwaan on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @09:55
Thanks Trolltech for releasing QT for windows and mac under GNU/GPL. Now we can see more QT applications in Linux, Windows and Mac too :)

I wonder how KOffice for Windows would look like ;)
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song sucks, but...
by 42 on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @10:33
hey...
do the qt4 dance! %-}

this is beyond embarrassing... but I'm sure it was great fun for all those dancing around in the vid ;)

- 42
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Cute Four Dance
by Amadeo on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @10:53
First there was linux
Than there was Mac
Now we put Windows
on the open source track...

The only thing better than that was the beta (alpha?) release of KDE codename krocodile theme... Go, Schnappi, go...
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Funny dance
by blacksheep on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @11:55
Just wondering, which one is Zack "The Hacker" Rusin? :)
The video's credits seq just says he is one of "The Cute Four".
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PyQt GPL in Windows ?
by MandrakeUser on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @12:27
Does the fact that there is now a GPL official Qt windows release mean that pyqt for windows will also have a GPL version ? That's gonna boost PyQt as a fantastic cross platform rapid dev. environment !

Maybe even PyKDE, are there any plans to natively port the kdelibs to the evil empire ?
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COOL
by superstoned on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @12:28
me and my girlfriend - we loved the musicvideo... :D
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Qt/Win GPL! But will it help freesoftware?
by cies breijs on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @14:41
It is said so many times already, im gonna say it again: thank you trolltech for GPL'ing Qt/Win.

Free Qt bindings (PyQt, etc.), some (maybe all some day) KDE technologies, generally more GPL software for win32...


Im stuck with one more question: will more GPL software for win32 be good for out beloveth FreeSoftwareMovement? (are there developers to inspire on the win32 platform?)

_cies.
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Anyone managed to compile it yet on windows?
by Leo S on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @18:18
Haven't gotten it to compile yet on windows. I extracted it and ran configure, which shows me the license and then asks if I accept. I type 'y' and enter and it just boots me back to the command line without doing anything or displaying anything.

Anyone got this to work yet? I have VS.NET 2003..
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hmmmm
by Anonymous on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @19:05
I have no idea how they will top that video for Qt 5.

So disturbing. I'd rather not think about it yet can't help thinking about it. :-)
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Congratulations
by Sagara Wijetunga on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @19:14
Hope QT4 lay the foundation for a rock solid KDE4 based Linux desktop that can change and SAVE the world. Congratulations to Trolltech, may your business flourish!
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Thank you
by Eu on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @22:51
I also want to thank trolltech. Whenever a company or fellow consultant is looking for a c++ development kit, I always point them your way in large part because I appreciate businesses that work hard to do the right thing.

I will try to continue to support you into the future. Thanks for all the wonderful technology.

KDE 4 will take a while, but I have no doubt that it will rock!
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Could this pave the way to a native win32 version?
by SJ Zero on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @23:04
I'm quite curious. I really like KDE. Whenever I use linux, I use it as my desktop environment. Does the release of a win32 version of gpl qt mean I might soon be able to replace Explorer on my windows machine with KDE?
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prj.files in Qt 4
by katakombi on Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @23:49
Hi, a question:

In old Qt versions the Designer managed prj. files, but now it seems that these functionality has been dropped?
Now I have to manage 'em myself via text editor?
Is there a reference on which keywords are available for .prj files?
QMake is a powerful tool I don't want to miss!


>8^) katakombi
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Great! I like it!
by Cavendish on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @01:32
Great! I like it!
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windows
by gerd on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @03:46
On Windows Kdevelop plus GNU Compiler Collection would be a real Visual Studio Killer.
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Tech
by Lucas Thompson on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @05:35
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. You guys are fantastic.
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software developer
by Kefah on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @05:42
I don't think that trolltech have emphasized this enough: now with the GPL'd QT4 there will be an avalanche in the number of KDE/QT freesoftware available natively under windows. Not all, especially the ones that relay on Posix/Unix APIs which would continue to rely on Cygwin. IMO, this QT4 GPL would represent a pivot in the history of software for years to come. It is now, and only now, that we can effortlessly develop native c++ applications that can be compiled and run on all platforms; that marrigged with FOSS would be the killer technology for Desktop applications.
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Easter Egg
by Anonymous on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @06:20
And has everyone already found the easter egg in Qt 4 Designer? :-)
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I really enjoyed the music video!
by Nilus Vortalds on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @06:36
But then again, I'm blind and deaf.
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Release schedule
by ac on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @13:37
IMHO is would be great if KDE4 could be out in early 2006. IIRC KDE 3.5 is
planned to come in september, and pretty much of Qt4 porting will be done by that
time (as most devs run both branches), no?
So don't let wait your users toooo long (as it happened with KDE 3.2).

Btw I compiled today Qt4 on an AthlonXP2200, and it took 2 hours to compile, and
the demos run a little sluggish... :-(
I have an Nvidia GForce 5200 with the latest binary driver on Linux 2.6.12.
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PostScript and WYSIWYG
by James Richard Tyrer on Wednesday 29/Jun/2005, @15:54
I don't see anything about the PostScript problems:

Wrong font names in PS files.
TrueType fonts rendered as Type 42 bitmaps in PS files.

I don't see anything about the WYSISYG problem:

Now WYGIWYS on the screen but, the fonts on the screen are hinted at the
screen resolution and the fonts that are printed have the actual font
metrics. The result is too much space between glyphs -- sometimes the
spacing is uneven as well.
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