Welcome to the Second Qt 4 Technology Preview

Dear Qt user,

We are pleased to present our second Technology Preview release for Qt
4. We are releasing this code snapshot to our users because we want to
show you some of the new technologies that will go into the final Qt 4
release, and because we want you to have the opportunity to give us
your feedback. The feedback we receive will help us to ensure that the
final Qt 4 release provides as much value and productivity as
possible.

This technology preview is licensed under a non-commercial license.
It is not meant to be used in production code or even for application
development. Furthermore, please do not attempt to start porting your
Qt 3 based projects over yet. Not all backward compatibility features
are in place yet, and we have not yet finished the porting guide and
the porting tools that will help you with the process. See
qt4-getting-started.html to get an overview of the main portability
issues or porting.html for a more in depth description.

What you can do is write new small programs to experience what the
next generation of Qt programming will be like. In particular, there
are five new technologies that we hope you will try out and give us
feedback on. All are new to Qt, written specifically for Qt 4:

 - Tulip, a new set of template container classes.
 - Interview, a model/view architecture for item views.
 - Arthur, the Qt 4 painting framework.
 - Scribe, the Unicode text renderer with a public API for performing
   low-level text layout.
 - Mainwindow, a modern action-based mainwindow, toolbar, menu, and
   docking architecture.

Since the first Technology Preview, we have made improvements to all
of the five new technologies, but in particular we have significantly
enhanced Interview, Arthur, and Scribe. Take a look at each of the
overviews for a more detailed description of the new features in each
of the technologies.

In addition, the following modules have been significantly improved
since Qt 3:

 - A fully cross-platform accessibility module with support for the
   emerging SP-API Unix standard in addition to Microsoft and
   Mac Accessibility.
 - The SQL module is now based on the Interview model/view
   framework.
 - The network module has better support for UDP and synchronous
   sockets.
 - The style API is now decoupled from the widgets, meaning that you
   can draw any user interface element on any device (widget,
   pixmap, etc.).

For a more detailed description about the preview and the mentioned
areas above please consult qt4-intro.html found in doc/html.

This is a preview of some of the Qt 4 libraries, not of the entire
application development framework. Most notably, new versions of Qt
Designer and Qt Linguist are not included. However, we do ship a
version of uic that allows you to experiment with .ui files generated
by version 3 of Qt Designer. We also ship a ported version of Qt
Assistant to make it easier to read the online documentation provided
with this package, although the Qt 4 documentation itself is still
far from complete.

Supported Platforms

The Technology Preview has been not been tested on the entire range of
platforms targeted by the final Qt 4.0 release. The following
platforms are supported:

  - GNU/Linux with gcc 2.95 or later on Intel x86
  - Mac OS X 10.3 with the native gcc compiler
  - Microsoft Windows 2000 and later with MSVC 6 or later
  - Qt/Embedded with gcc 3.3 on Intel x86

Other operating systems and compilers might work, but are not yet part
of the testing program.

How to Provide Feedback

Trolltech has set up a special mailing list, qt4-preview-feedback, for
discussion of Qt Technology Preview related issues. To subscribe, send
a message containing just the word "subscribe" (without the quotes) to
qt4-preview-feedback-request@trolltech.com.  We encourage you to use
this mailing list instead of qt-interest for preview-specific
issues. See http://lists.trolltech.com/ for more information on
Trolltech's mailing lists, including archived discussions.

Roadmap

We plan to enter the beta phase in Q4, 2004 and release the final Qt
4.0 in late Q1, 2005.

Enjoy the Technology Preview. We hope you will have as much fun and
pleasure experimenting with Qt 4 as we had designing and building it.

--The Trolltech Qt 4 Team
