Nokia Releases Qt 4.7
New version of Qt features QML, an advanced new declarative programming language, and significant performance improvements.
September 21, 2010 – Nokia today released Qt 4.7, the latest version of the cross-platform application and UI framework. It is available for download now for all of Qt’s supported platforms, with upgrades for Nokia and customer solutions expected over the coming months.
New way of developing Qt apps
A key feature of Qt 4.7 is QML (Qt Meta-Object-Language), an easy to learn, declarative language that ‘describes’ the interface of a program and how it behaves. It will be instantly familiar to developers who prefer scripting type languages such as Javascript and it allows UI designers and developers to work together in an iterative approach.
Improved performance, quicker apps
Qt 4.7 includes significant performance improvements that make applications and user interfaces run faster and smoother. Examples of these improvements include:
- New hardware accelerated compositing in QtWebkit has accelerated QtWebkit animation rendering by 31% over Qt 4.6.0, resulting in “snappier” user interfaces
- In benchmark tests of popular websites, Facebook pages scrolled up to 67% faster, and other, less complicated pages scrolled on average 350% faster* due to significant scrolling speed improvements in QtWebkit
- The new QStaticText class makes text render more than twice as fast as in Qt 4.6
- The QPainter engine makes it possible to draw particle systems more efficiently in OpenGL
“Qt 4.7 is an important step forward that keeps Qt at the forefront of UI and application development frameworks,” said Sebastian Nyström, Vice President, Application and Service Frameworks, Nokia.
“Developers looking to create rich, fluid UIs and apps will be amazed at how easy it is to use the new features in Qt 4.7,”
“Continuing to enhance Qt’s performance and stability is vital, and we’re proud to have taken Qt even further in these two areas.” concluded Nyström.
Updated Qt SDK Available for Download
An updated Qt SDK is now available for download. It contains Qt 4.7, Qt Creator 2.0.1 and everything developers need to create applications and to easily re-use the code across the Qt supported platforms. It can be downloaded at http://qt.nokia.com/downloads.
Qt 4.7 kickstart at Qt Developer Days
Qt 4.7 and Qt Quick are the central theme of the upcoming Qt Developer Days conferences in Munich (11-13 October) and San Francisco (1-3 November), with dedicated training, workshops, demos and more delivered by the developers of Qt. Read more about Qt Developer Days at http://qt.nokia.com/qtdevdays2010.
Qt Quick update
QML and Qt Declarative are two of the three pieces of the Qt Quick UI creation kit. The final component of Qt Quick - the tooling – will come with the Qt Creator 2.1 release, currently scheduled for release later in 2010.
Qt Visual Studio integration update
An update to Qt’s Visual Studio Add-in Integration was also released today, to better enable developers to use Qt together with the popular IDE. The Qt Visual Studio Add-in is now also available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1.
Learn more
To learn more about Qt 4.7 and to download the packages please visit http://qt.nokia.com/whatsnew or visit us in person at Qt Developer Days 2010 http://qt.nokia.com/qtdevdays2010.