Nokia today released the latest version of its cross platform application and UI framework, QT 4.6. Featuring support for a new platform and possessing powerful new graphical capabilities and support for multi-touch and gestures, Qt 4.6 makes thing easier for the developers who are developing advanced applications and devices.
The Interesting Features in this new release are:
1. Support for More Platforms:
Qt 4.6 now includes support for the Symbian platform, Windows 7, Apple Mac OS 10.6 and the upcoming Maemo6 . Also the community support is now available for real-time OS like QNX and VxWorks. Support for Maemo 5 is currently in development, with the second technology preview being released today.
Qt support for Symbian and Maemo creates the first opportunity for developers to target both of these platforms from the same codebase. Sharing code across platforms means that the applications that gets developed will reach the market faster and also will appeal to a broader audience of device users.
A technology preview of new Qt APIs from the Qt Mobility project has also released today. These cross-platform APIs help developers with functionalities such as location for navigation-type devices, as well as messaging, contacts, and bearer management etc.
2.More eye candy:
Qt 4.6 builds upon the graphical improvements of 4.5 and enhances them with the addition of a new Animation Framework – including an intuitive state machine functionality and new advanced graphics effects like opacity, drop shadows, glow, and filtering etc.
3. More fingers:
One of the Major feature which is exciting in Qt 4.6 is the ability to create multi-touch applications. A New multi-touch and gesture based input methods such as flicking and kinetic scrolling has been added to make Qt 4.6 a powerful framework for creating dynamic, tactile ways for users to interact with applications and devices.
4.More horsepower:
Qt 4.6 now challenges the conventional development notion that advanced UI capabilities normally comes at a cost of significant performance decrease. Extensive work has been done in this area to deliver the best possible performance while enabling the developers to deliver the “wow” effect which is nowadays one of the most sought feature in an app by the users.
Major Performance Improvements comse in the form of a highly optimized, rewritten Qt Graphics View rendering algorithm, a new OpenGL paint engine, WebKit and a 2D vector graphic support using OpenVG, and new DirectFB support.
5. Updated tools:
An updated release of Qt Creator, a cross-platform IDE for Qt development has also been released complementing the Qt4.6 release. Both Qt Creator 1.3 and Qt 4.6 form the Qt SDK which contains everything a developer needs to create cross-platform applications.
To know more about Qt 4.6, Qt Creator 1.3 and to download the Qt SDK, please visit http://qt.nokia.com/whatsnew.