Qt 4.0 Release Candidate Available

Friday, 10 June 2005  |  Binner

Trolltech has announced the Qt 4 release candidate, the final preview of next generation Qt. The final release of Qt 4.0 is scheduled for late June until which Trolltech will focus on addressing critical stability issues only. This release introduces several new features and capabilities including completely refreshed and re-engineered Qt demos and examples. Commercial offers were restructured into Qt Console for non-GUI development, Qt Desktop Light replacing the Professional and Qt Desktop comparable to Enterprise editions. Download it from ftp.trolltech.com (mirrors) or read the online Qt Reference Documentation for What's New in Qt 4.

Comments:

YUV support - Jens Tinz - 2005-06-10

Wasn't there supposed to be support for the YUV format in QImages?

Hindi 'Halant' character Bug fixed??? - fast_rizwaan - 2005-06-10

All KDE Applications crash when the 'Halant' character is entered many times. Has this been fixed in QT4?

Re: Hindi 'Halant' character Bug fixed??? - Jel - 2005-06-11

I'm just curious: what's special about that character?

Re: Hindi 'Halant' character Bug fixed??? - Jaldhar H. Vyas - 2005-06-11

In Indian languages, a letter consists of a consonant plus a vowel ("a" by default.) But you can also get compound consonants. For example, in my surname, if you just put a "va" and "yaa" together, you would get the wrong sound. Instead in unicode you would express it as va + halant + ya + aa. Normally you don't see the halant. Indian typography has different visual shapes for most compound characters.

Re: Hindi 'Halant' character Bug fixed??? - Jaldhar H. Vyas - 2005-06-11

Do you have a bug number or other reference for this? Because I can't say I've noticed it.

Licensing - aleXXX - 2005-06-10

Hi, are licensing/pricing informations already available ? Would be cool if Qt/Console would cost significantly less than Qt/Desktop Light. Will the runtime licensing for Qt/Embedded remain ? It's quite costly, roughly in the same range as Win CE runtime licenses, so that the cost advantage of using Linux for embedded stuff is gone :-/ Alex

Re: Licensing - $$/\$$ - 2005-06-10

A toolkit given to us the FOSS movement, on a news site about an OSS desktop environment, and you complaining about licensing costs. Why don't you just write free software (or else put your questions somewhere else). Thanks

Re: Licensing - Amadeo - 2005-06-10

I don't think he is complaining (yet). And it is a fair question.

Re: Licensing - aleXXX - 2005-06-11

Google would have told you that I am writing free software for about 8 years now, and you are probably using parts of it. Qt rocks, so I'd like to use it also at work. The prices for the developer licenses are ok, and probably Qt/Console will cost less than Qt/Desktop. But the argument "Win CE is more expensive than Linux on embedded devices" becomes basically void if the runtime licenses of Qt (GUI toolkit) cost more or less the same as for Win CE (OS + GUI toolkit). Alex

Re: Licensing - $$/\$$ - 2005-06-11

So do I (a KDE contributer and living from writing software). However I still think this question belongs on a Qt forum, because it discredits KDE's Qt base. KDE is about free software (but can happily run apps based on other toolkits too). What annoys me with questions like this, is that something is given to us. And instead of saying thank you, lets see how we can use this, you say I want more, cheaper etc. I don't think asking this will encourage trolltech to do more for us. Obviously they have their reasons, making a living for themselves as well. So either pay for it or use a free LGPL alternative. Either way, it's off topic for KDE. Btw. it's also possible to write GPL software for a living. My software is always a special product, only one use, and often the client wants the source code anyways. So by giving the client a choice for either cheaper GPL code (because of less time to implement) or more expensive proprietary code, makes it for me a non-issue. Besides, I like to be multi-functional anyways. So IMO, accept what you're given and, if it's not enough, put your energy in extending/improving toolkits that do give you the freedom for writing closed source ones.

Re: Licensing - Evan "JabberWokky" E. - 2005-06-11

Quite a few people here program for a living and would like to use Qt for that work. There's no problem with his question; one of the advantages of dual licensing is that it can be used in either a FOSS environment or a commercial environment. -- Evan

Re: Licensing - Anonymous - 2005-06-11

> are licensing/pricing informations already available ? No.

just tried it - jumpy - 2005-06-11

wow! it rocks.. better than any previous snapshot. qtdemo is great. designer is very usable (there is even some interesting stuff in plugins.. ;-) go trolls, go!

Can't get it to use opengl - ac - 2005-06-11

I use the latest Nvidia driver and I remember that opengl was enabled when I was compiling beta2. At that point of time I had also an older nvidia driver. I saw no configure option to turn on opengl support, does anybody have a hint?

Re: Can't get it to use opengl - ac - 2005-06-28

apt-get install xlibmesa-glu-dev that was the missing package

Font database - and new fonts... - Craig - 2005-06-13

Haven't had time to compile Qt4 just yet - but can somebody answer this simple(ish) question? Is it possible to get Qt4 to recognise newly installed fonts whilst an app is running? i.e. run an app, copy a font to ~/.fonts (or fonts:/ in konqueror), can the Qt app now see the new font? Looking at the source code for Qt3 it appears as if Qt creates a static database of the systems fonts each time an app is started, and there is no way to ask Qt to re-build this database. I assume the same applies to Qt4? (Xft, which Qt uses, can be told to refresh its list of fonts - so Qt has no excuse...)

win binaries? - katakombi - 2005-06-13

Argh, and still no GPL'ed win binaries? I can't see the point to keep 'em back, since the official release will include a GPL'ed version. I need these win version _now_...

WYSIWYG - James Richard Tyrer - 2005-06-13

I still don't see how it is going to do WYSIWYG? However, PaintDeviceMetric seems to be missing from the documentation.

slow? - Jens - 2005-06-14

I'm surprised noone has mentioned that yet, but to me qt4 feels slower, sluggish, definitly slower than qt3 / kde. the arthur stuff (bin/qtdemo) is creeping (but I had to disable RenderAccel due to stability issues - however, that might not change anything anyway), but other things as well: resizing the columns in the qtdesigner properties pane lags behind the mouse cursor, that doesn't happen with qt3. Mind you, this is an old machine (900 mhz cpu), but it'd be a pity if all of kde got slower by that amount next year. or am I doing something wrong? Jens

Re: slow? - ac - 2005-06-15

Yes, you disabled RenderAccel.

Re: slow? - Dr_Bollokovski - 2005-06-15

yup disabling renderaccel drags it all down. otherwise it looks tasty