Today we have reached another significant milestone in Qt’s life - 4.6.0-tp1 has been released. This is the first step in the 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.
It’s an exciting time to be the Qt Release Manager. Qt 4.6 is the first feature release that I’ve been involved in from the very start. And Qt 4.6 is a big release - there’s a lot of new stuff and making all of that play nicely with all of the existing stuff is a big challenge. Luckily we enjoy a challenge here at Qt Developer Frameworks.
You can get the packages from the Qt website here, or from our ftp site: tar.gz version or zip version. You can also find the latest documentation at http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6-snapshot/index.html. (For those interested, the packages were generated from SHA1 c4c9b4457f0f760c1bf46dd8a309ab76eb128c1d in the qt.git source repository.)
Our 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. Now that all the new 4.6 features are in the code, we are at the beginning of an intensive bug-fixing period that will likely last a few months.
At the end of that period we hope to release the most feature-rich and high-quality Qt ever, but to do that we need your help. There are two ways you can help: if you found a bug, you can submit a fix or an autotest that demonstrates the bug via the public qt-repository on http://qt.gitorious.org. Alternatively, if you have any bug reports or suggestions, whether they relate to the code, the documentation, or something else Qt-related, just follow the instructions for submitting feedback.
I won’t go into detail about the new features that are making their debut in Qt 4.6 (there’s already plenty of information about them on Labs, directly from the developers), but I would like to highlight a couple of important changes to Qt’s packaging and supported platforms.
Previously, we have delivered source packages for each of our major supported platforms (Windows, MacOS X, X11, embedded-linux, embedded-wince, and an “all” package that included the code for all of the desktop platforms). Beginning with 4.6.0, we are delivering a single source package that contains the code for all platforms (there are .tar.gz and .zip versions of the file, but the contents are identical). This should remove any confusion about which package is the right one to download, not to mention making the Release Manager’s life a little easier.
On the supported platforms: In Qt 4.6, QtScript is not enabled by default on platforms for which QtWebKit is not supported. However it does compile
on them and you can re-enable it by passing the “-script” option to configure.
That’s all for now. We hope that Qt 4.6 provides something new, interesting and useful for all of you.
24 Responses to “Qt 4.6.0 Tech Preview 1”
Please could someone take a look at this bug: http://qt.nokia.com/developer/task-tracker/index_html?method=entry&id=251397
Its been a problem since before Qt 4.5. Basically means most HTTPS sites are completely unusable for me. The two most important being my bank, and my creditcard’s website.
can you post that video to other sites too ? youtube is banned in turkey and I cant watch 
Who screwed up the documentation….must be some kind of a joke, right!?
Oh, Hi Thiago!
Nice to actually see you alive.
Happy to see all this evolution
I understand you only supply a source package. But it would be nice to supply a small GUI from which one could decide what to built according to one’s active system and compiler. “A one click build” concept. That would be more incentive to try the preview than to pass through the intall / configure instructions.
Very nice indeed!
I was wondering how easy it is to make something like this with the animation framework:
I have a lot of items that move and resize in an animated fashion. The resizing of the items actually affects the movement (in addition to the normal movement) because there is always the same space between all items. All of these animations can change at any point in time (e.g. the endpoint of the movement and the direction of the resizing) due to user interaction. This is a plasma applet so I first used Plasma::Animator (which is very limited, much more limited than QTimeline). So when one Item resizes itself and thus determines a neighboring item has to move, it has to change the animation of this item. This means it stops the moving animation of the neighbor and starts a new one. Because in the first frame the animation slot gets the value 0.0 no movement happens in the first frame. When this animation updates happen in each and every frame no movement at all happens!
Is such a thing possible in an easy way with Qt 4.6? Currently I just use a QTimer (not even QTimeline) to animate ALL items at once and determine in the animation slot whether the animation has ended and thus the timer can be stopped (I know, ugly).
Also I need to detect which item the mouse is hovering. But not really which item as where they are currently located due tu the animation, but the item the mouse would be hovering when the animation has ended. I wrote my own QGraphicsLayout for all of this. I use this for the manual task item sorting in Smooth-Tasks: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Smooth+Tasks?content=101586
@Sir Johnn: what’s wrong with the documentation? For me it’s better than before! (http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6-snapshot/index.html).
The QtMultimedia module is so crap it makes me cry and start thinking Qt will stop being a top notch API to be just another Nokia crap :-/
“In Qt 4.6, QtScript is not enabled by default on platforms for which QtWebKit is not supported.”
Is this because the QtScript-on-JavaScriptCore project was successful and is in 4.6?
illissius: Yes. We’re working on fixing compilation on affected platforms (i.e. where QtScript used to compile, but WebKit/JavaScriptCore didn’t/doesn’t) for the final 4.6 release. Quite a few of the fixes are actually in Tech Preview 1 (Solaris, HPUX, VS2003), but we didn’t dare to modify the configure scripts until that release was out, which is why you may need to explicitly pass -script in the Tech Preview.
Thiago is adorable, but I have to wonder what was so exciting off-camera that he kept glancing at it.
On the other hand, it might be best not to find out
@Thomas: unfortunately, that’s not a Qt bug. It’s an OpenSSL issue and their developers will also tell you it’s not a bug. It’s your bank that is doing something wrong. Please take it up with the bank and OpenSSL developers. Alternatively, downgrade your OpenSSL implementation to before 0.9.8i (note that there may be security issues).
Does KDE support 4.6 TP1
Will the Symbian SDK every be supported on Linux
I need the “main classes” returned because I prefer Firefox for documentation. I store the documentation locally so I can read it offline which means I rely on the indexes. 99% of the time, the class I’m looking for is in “main classes” so having the shorter index is a Big Win for me.
Besides, you have a blank space right next to “All Classes” where it would fit.
@David, KDE doesn’t support 4.6 TP1 - it’s only been out a few hours! That said, things will probably work ok.
@Panzi: This blog is not the best place to discuss such things. My advice: go to qt4-preview-feedback list or #qt-kinetic and continue the discussion over there.
@Thiago, it worked fine in KDE3/Qt3, it also works fine in firefox. Both my bank and credit card websites are completely unusable. Are they BOTH doing something wrong? And no one but I have noticed it?
Many thanks to those who have already tried out the Tech Preview, Some good feedback has been received already. Keep it coming.
Thomas: Qt3 has no SSL support.
Regarding QtScript: Does this mean that you cannot use non-GUI applications with QtScript any more (as QtWebKit depends on QtGui)? Or does one have to compile an extra Qt Version without QtWebKit but with QtScript? It would be nice if QtScript could load the available Backend on demand.
@Nils: QtScript does not depends on QtWebkit. Currently QtScript just link statically against JavaScriptCore (one subdirectory of webkit). (We are looking into making JavaScriptCore a shared library between, QtWebkit and QtScript)
So No: QtScript doesn’t require GUI
@Jason: Will the SDKs for Qt 4.6 include MinGW-w64 along with Win64 Qt libraries? What about Windows Touch in Windows 7?
@Philippe
Ok. What can I say….the new reference index has been mutilated and contains far less important and useful shotcuts to items that one needs, in QT development-wise sense, compared to the older index. For example 4.6 Fundamentals vs. 4.5 Core features or 4.6 Technologies vs 4.5 Key technologies, or the removal of Tool subgroup…the new 4.6 view for the developer doing his/her job is poor and ill designed if you make a comparison to 4.5 version. The persentage of unuseful information in the view for user wanting to find easy way to reference documentation or relevant information is higher in the 4.6 index.
Sorry to say but the new index serves it’s users, us, poorly.
Woohoo! QQuaternion and QVector3.