We’re happy to announce that Qt for Maemo 5 entered Beta status – this means that all APIs are feature complete and have been reviewed by multiple people. For us, this means that an intense phase of bug hunting and testing is starting. For you, it means that you can now finally develop without us changing class names or behavior all the time (*) 
Lots of changes went into Qt since the last Technical Preview:
- Support for NEON instructions for increased drawing speed
- Refactored Kinetic Scrolling
- Kinetic Scrolling now default for all QAbstractScrollArea and QWebView based widgets
- QMaemo5KineticScroller is not needed anymore and was removed. To override scrolling behavior or to disable it altogether, QAbstractKineticScroller can be used
- Take a look at the kinetic scroller example (examples/maemo5/scroller) for information on how to tweak scrolling
- Lots of styling fixes
- QtMultimedia got an N900 backend
- Documentation now online at http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-maemo-4.6/
- New Maemo 5 specific examples:
How do I get it?
Short story: Add Maemo’s “extras-devel” repository and type “fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-maemo5-dev”. Qt will be installed to “/opt/qt4-maemo5″. The long story can be found on the wiki.
The source code repository is at http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/x11-maemo. Check out “README.maemo5″ for build instructions.
How to contact us?
You can reach us via the “qt-maemo-feedback” mailing list (see Mailing List instructions), or on the “#qt-maemo” IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. For bug reports, you can use our bug tracking system at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/. Please set the bug’s component to “Maemo 5″.
How to debug
The current Maemo 5 SDK still contains gdb 6.8, which is unstable when debugging Qt applications. gdb 7 is scheduled for the next release, in the meantime, you can find a custom package at http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/gdb7/. gdb 7.0 is installed as “gdb7″ (note the “7″ suffix) to /usr/local/bin, so it won’t clash with the existing gdb. Once gdb 7 support lands in the official SDK, you can safely uninstall our package.
How about QtDeclarative?
QtDeclarative is available for Maemo 5 (“fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-maemo5-declarative-dev”), but is still considered a technology preview.
How about Qt Creator or MADDE?
Unfortunately, neither full Qt Creator nor MADDE support is available for this Beta. Currently, the ScratchBox based SDK is the only supported development environment.
Curtain Call
A big thank you goes to the Qt and KDE communities for all the patches, reports and discussions. A big hand also for Kevin Ottens for his Virtual Machine which accelerates Qt and KDE for Maemo development quite a bit.
(*) read/only QComboBox might change into a value picker button
Possibly related posts:
10 comments
Awesome work guys. All your hard work helped me with a n900 at the maemo bangalore contest
Hi,
one question. Correct me please if I may have misunderstood something.
AFAIK: Maemo5 is the last Maemo based on GTK+. The next Maemo will be based on qt.
So I ask myself. Why should I develop on Maemo5 with qt instead of focusing on the next release?
Is it possible to run or easily convert Software based on Maemo5 with qt to the next qt-only maemo? If so that would be a killerfeature.
Just some question from somebody who knows almost nothing about that topic but is curious anyway. I hope it is not too stupid
Cheers
Warning: This blog entry contains large quantities of nifty, and should be consumed in full by everybody
>Is it possible to run or easily convert Software based on Maemo5 with qt
>to the next qt-only maemo? If so that would be a killerfeature.
I believe that’s the intention of releasing Qt for Maemo 5 (as a sort of transition period from GTK -> Qt).
Don’t think that this port is created to make the transition to Maemo 6 easier, but more to start using Qt power instead of GTK on Maemo.
Later on, porting your application will be much easier, but it’s just because it’s already Qt.
Very good stuff. Good work guys!
I am waiting Maemo5 for a long time!!!! Now i can start my project for this platform! Thx guys u a the BEST.
Hey , i am not that much of a tech geek but i am trying to learn . i have the n900 and i love it and i keep following its updates..but there are alooot of stuff i still dont know what they mean. for example , QT… awkward but…can anyone explain to me what exactly it is and what it does?
@ramzi: Qt is a set of tools that helps “tech geeks” develop features that would hopefully make you love your phone even more. If you want more info – http://qt.nokia.com is the place to start…
Scrollbars still do not act like native scrollbars on OS X. To be specific, System Preferences allows the user to select whether clicking above/below the scroller moves to the preview/next page (“Jump to next page”) or to the absolute position associated with the click. I submitted a bug and a fix, and I keep hoping that eventually it will get put in.
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