Nokia releases Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 betas, including support for Symbian

14 October 2009 – Qt Developer Days, Munich, Germany – Nokia today released the first betas of Qt 4.6: the upcoming new version of its cross-platform application and UI framework for desktop, embedded and mobile application and service development, and Qt Creator 1.3: the upcoming new version of its cross-platform Qt Integrated Development Environment. Both releases are available for download now at http://qt.nokia.com/downloads.
 
“Community developers working alongside us have provided extensive technical feedback to support the enhancement and fine-tuning of both Qt and Qt Creator,” said Lars Knoll, Director of Qt R&D at Nokia. “Since we opened Qt for contributions in May 2009, there have been over 400 community submissions to Qt and Qt Creator. This is very rewarding and endorses our decision to work in a more transparent, open way”.

With community input in mind, development of the Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 releases is focused around several key themes:

• Allow Qt developers to target new platforms:  In addition to new support for Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6, Qt 4.6 introduces a port of Qt to the Symbian Platform with integration for the S60 framework.  Together with preliminary support in the Qt Creator IDE for Qt development targeting the Symbian platform, optimizations for the Linux/X11-based Maemo 6 platform and preview code for the newly announced Qt port to Maemo 5, this makes Qt a standard not only for desktop but now also for mobile development.

• Create new and exciting user experiences: Qt 4.6 adds advanced graphics effects, a new animation framework and support for gesture-based and multi-touch input methods.

• Deliver better application performance: Performance optimizations to key areas of Qt, a new JavaScriptCore based backend for QtScript as part of an updated Qt WebKit Integration, and new support for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics using OpenVG will make Qt 4.6 the best-performing Qt version ever.

Beta packages of Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 are now available to the Qt user community for download, testing and feedback. Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 are scheduled for release in Q4 2009.

New Qt Blog

Qt Development Frameworks has also recently launched a new Qt-focused blog. This blog, located at http://blog.qt.nokia.com will include product and roadmap information, details on Qt usage, updates on Qt events and activities and other topics that interest the Qt community.
 

How to Provide Feedback

All feedback from the Qt user community is highly valued and extensive use and testing of the new features in Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 is encouraged.  Qt users are invited to share feedback via Qt mailing lists, the Qt Trask Tracker system, or by contributing their own bug fixes via the open Qt repositories at http://qt.gitorious.org. 

For more information on how to provide feedback on the releases, please visit the Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 preview pages at the links below.

Download the Qt 4.6 Beta

Download the Qt Creator 1.3 Beta