Home | All Classes | Main Classes | Annotated | Grouped Classes | Functions |

# 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 functionality is in place yet, and we have not yet finished the Porting Guide and the porting tools that will help you with the process once the Qt 4 final release is imminent.

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:

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

Follow the hyperlinks above for a detailed description for each of the five areas, including the current state of development and our plans for the final release.

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:

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

See also Getting Started with Qt 4 for an overview of the main portability issues.

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. But 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