13 March 2009

Qt Demo on a Nokia 5800
The latest Qt for S60 pre-release is out!

Nokia has recently announced the availability of Qt 4.5, a major update of the popular cross-platform application and UI framework and the Qt Creator, a new lightweight cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

This release also marks an important milestone for the open source community. For the first time Qt will include the LGPL licensing option to go along with the Commercial License and GPL licensing options currently available.

In addition to the new product releases and licensing changes, Qt Software is also introducing a new flexible technical support package for LGPL and GPL license users. Developers using these licenses will now be able to purchase technical support from Qt Software.

Jbarron from the Trolltech Labs has posted up an interesting piece on about latest Qt release while the Espen takes you on a detailed video walk through the Garden (release) demoed on Nokia 5800 XM.

Following fresh on the heels of the Qt 4.5.0 release, our latest release, commonly referred to as “Garden”, is a real showcase for all the hard work that we have done over the past 4 months.

Espen set the bar pretty high when he mentioned our ambitions for Garden back in December, but I am quite proud to say that we pulled it all off in the end.

One of the most obvious differences you’ll notice from the previous (Temple) release is that this one is based on Qt 4.5. That means we got a bunch of performance improvements and other features practically for free!

One of the main goals of this release was to cleverly disguise Qt applications as native S60 applications and see if we could fool our grandmothers.

This was no easy feat considering that S60 has interchangeable themes, input methods, and special menus and adding to that the fact that our previous release looked like a certain OS from 1995, we knew we had some work to do.

Well, grandma put on her reading specs and fired up her XpressMusic 5800 to have a look and she was pleasantly surprised!

She immediately saw the application themed correctly and could input text like she did in other S60 applications (they call her “CrazyThumbs” at bingo) and after trying some other Qt applications she could use menus and even drag-n-drop worked!

Well, needless to say she had no idea that she was using the same application framework that powered the desktop environment on her Linux box!