09 September 2009

Qt 4.6 To Bring Multitouch & Gestures
Support To Maemo and Symbian Smartphones

Nokia announced today the availability of Technology Preview of Qt 4.6, a major update of the popular cross-platform application and UI framework which now includes the port to the Symbian platform with integration of the S60 framework, previously known as "Qt for S60".

This release also marks an important milestone for the open source community and another significant milestone in Qt’s life. Qt 4.6 is the first step in process of turning all of the great new Qt features you’ve been reading about on Labs into a coherent, stable and polished product that will power a new generation of applications.

Qt 4.6 extends Qt and introduces a range of new features and optimizations but unfortunately, it will be hard to go in details about all new features that are making their debut in latest QT release, so I’ll only highlight couple of new featuers that are set to bring more exciting user experiences.

With addition of an advanced graphics effects like opacity, drop-shadows, glow and filtering, new animation framework, gesture-based and multi-touch input Qt 4.6 will make it possible to develop modern, advanced UIs on Maemo 6 and Symbian.

Yes you read it right, according to technical documentation, the Qt 4.6 will bring gesture based commands as well as multi-touch user interface to mobile devices powered with either, Memo 6 or Symbian^4.

The new multi-touch and gestures support enables user interaction with more than one finger, and combines sequential touch inputs to a 'gesture'. The main benefits of this new functionality are allowing users to interact with applications in better ways, simplifying finger-based interaction with UI components, allowing common basic gestures and multi-touch gestures as well as enabling extensibility.

The main reason for providing this Tech Preview release is to solicit constructive feedback from the community of users and developers. The Tech Preview will contain bugs - with the amount of new code that has gone into Qt 4.6 that is unavoidable.