26 June 2009

Qt 'Tower' Demo On A Nokia N97
The New Pre-release Of Qt For S60 Is Out!

Three months after their latest release, commonly referred to as 'Garden', the Qt to S60 porting and dev team is pleased to provide another pre-release (based on Qt 4.5.2.) of the S60 Qt port.

Qt for S60 is now getting close to being feature complete, it is also much easier to install than before and if you did not already, this is the perfect time to start playing with Qt for S60!

This time, the pre-release code name is “Tower” and nearly all functional areas which are wrapped by Qt’s beautiful Api are now doing their job also on S60 devices.

Besides the usual optimizations, fixes, code cleaning and various improvements, there are three fresh modules: Phonon, QtSql and QtWebkit, new softkeys and input methods APIs, as well as a brand new installer.

Phonon on S60 is building and applications that are built against it will run, but there is currently no functional Phonon backend on S60. QtWebkit on S60 is still considered experimental.

However, You should already be able to start developing QtWebKit refined applications for the pocket. A complete list of changes can be found here.

In addition to the new features, work has also begun on making Qt exception safe, in order to fill the gap between Symbian and Qt exception systems. You can read more about Qt and exceptions here.

This release also makes the installation of Qt for S60 easy. An installer will copy the Qt libraries (for emulator and hardware) to the places where they belong. Start using Qt, right away, the dark ages of required manual Qt builds are over.

Folks over at QtSoftware love to create videos and altogether with the Tower release we also got a new videos showing some demos and how to get started:

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.