Onwards and upwards

Posted by Thiago Macieira on February 5, 2009 · 10 comments

We’re finally there! The long-awaited Qt 4.5 release candidate is out! Downloads are available through the QtSoftware website. For the impatient, I’ve copy/pasted the download table here:

Platform Download Source Package
Download Binary
Windows    Download .zip  Download.exe 
Mac Download tar.gz Download .dmg
Linux/X11 Download tar.gz -
Embedded Linux Download tar.gz -
Windows CE   Download .zip 
-

Note to self: ask webmaster to use the same CSS theme in both Labs and in the main website

We’ve done lots of work in performance and we added the pluggable graphics system support. Performance on the native and raster engines should be much better than it was before. Performance work also touched Graphics View (clipping, scrolling) and went even as far down as URL-parsing in QUrl

We added support for 64-bit applications on the Mac with Cocoa — though you can use Cocoa in 32-bit too. I don’t know why, after all you have more registers in 64-bit (that’s what Apple tells anyways).

We upgraded QtWebKit to upstream trunk, bringing in some HTML5 features as well as Netscape Plugin support, meaning you can finally see ads on websites (who knows, you may even be one of those who click on them!). By integrating QtWebKit with Phonon, we added support for <audio> and <video> tags, without the need for a Flash video player.

We also upgraded Phonon to the latest release (4.3.0), though this technically means we’re making a new release of Phonon (4.3.1). The QuickTime 7 / QTKit backend for Phonon got an overhaul and was rewritten in Objective C so that it can be built in 64-bit mode too. We also added a new, very simple backend called “waveout” for Windows CE devices that have no codecs or DirectShow.

QtScript got a debugger, both in the form of an API (see the QtScriptTools module) and a graphical debugger.

And one of my features has finally made it to the news page: improved proxy support.

Thanks to all the trolls who did amazing work for this release and to all contributors who sent us patches, ideas and feedback. We’re releasing at an all-time low of Priority 1 tasks left, but feedback is definitely welcome. Please post your feedback to the qt4-preview-feedback@trolltech.com mailing list and we’ll be sure to address it as soon as possible.

Edit: Qt Creator 0.9.2 RC is also out!

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  1. Qt 4.7.0 Release Candidate available

10 comments

1 Yves February 5, 2009 at 10:10 pm
 

Compile fails on Linux, (with no ./configure options here at all), here is someone who has it as well and already posted to the qt4-preview-feedback list:
http://lists.trolltech.com/pipermail/qt4-preview-feedback/2009-February/000389.html

2 SDiZ February 6, 2009 at 12:14 pm
 

Have you finalized the license? I am waiting for the details on those LGPL exceptions you gain to C++ template and other open source licenses.

3 Thiago Macieira February 6, 2009 at 3:00 pm
 

The final license (LGPL) will come with the final package only.

4 Acenes February 6, 2009 at 3:51 pm
 

The first tests I did were promising. Unfortunately I can not use the RC for our large scale applications under Qt commercial license, because our development process is based on the visual studio 2005 integration which is not available as it seems. Will you make the vs integrations available for the RC, or will we have to wait until the final release to do thorough tests?

5 Thiago Macieira February 6, 2009 at 8:41 pm
 

Hi Acenes

The Visual Studio integration is not necessary to run or develop Qt. But you can always use the current release (version 1.4.3) and it should just work.

6 Acenes February 7, 2009 at 1:52 am
 

I know that you can also develop without vs integration, thats what I did in the first tests. However a large solution with 50+ projects and hunderts of files is not switched that easy from vs integration to qmake, and the integration of 4.4.3 does not work properly with 4.5.0 (designer, plugins etc.).

Anyway reading between the lines of your answer, I will have to wait for the final release then.

7 tim February 7, 2009 at 10:02 pm
 

Thanks: Very very nice!
One note: Had to add “int callgrindChildExitCode;” to qtestcase.cpp to make it compile.

8 Frédéric Julian February 8, 2009 at 4:50 pm
 

I agree with the “qtestcase.cpp:1490: error: ‘callgrindChildExitCode’ was not declared in this scope” error, I had the same.

I’m use to compil my own version of Qt without problem (on my debian/testing), but this time, with the 4.5, all is broken!!
Am I the only one to have very poor graphics? with glitches and without animations?

http://scythia.free.fr/file/qt4.5_bug.png

I have this kind of issues with all the rendering engines… and some of my apps are completly unusable…
Do someone had the same problem?

9 jensen February 11, 2009 at 12:47 pm
 

Will the official 4.5 release binary package for the Mac contain x86_64 support? I know for the beta preview you had to compile from source to get 64 bit support, but the release candidate lists 64 bit support on the Mac as one of its main points. Nonetheless the binary package only contains support for the ppc and i386 architectures, so I still had to compile from source to get 64 bit support

cheers,
Brian

10 Islam February 15, 2009 at 10:32 pm
 

Yes I get the same error. Notice how at line 1414 of qtestcase.cpp we have:
int callgrindChildExitCode;

while at line 1490 of the same file, we don’t have such a declaration. That’s why the compile fail… I suppose!

I had to manually add (int callgrindChildExitCode;) at line 1489 of the same file.

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