Welcome to the First Qt 4.2 Technology Preview

Dear Qt user,

We are pleased to present our first Technology Preview release for Qt 4.2.
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 4.2
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
4.2 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
4.1 based projects over yet. Not all APIs are are frozen yet, and we have
not yet finished the documentation for all new features.

What you can do is write new small programs to experience how the new
features will behave.

In particular, there are several major new technologies that we hope you
will try out and give us feedback on. All are new to Qt, written
specifically for Qt 4.2:

- Graphics View: A powerful 2D graphics area for highly optimized graphics
development.  Graphics View replaces and builds on the former Q3Canvas,
adding significant new functionality in the areas of item interaction,
optimized level-of-detail rendering, affine item transformations, enhanced
control over animations and enhanced drag and drop features.

- Desktop Services: A new group of features that provide consistent,
user-preference-aware methods for accessing common desktop services,
enabling tasks such as opening a web page, file, folder or e-mail composer
to be initiated from the desktop.

In addition, the following modules have been significantly improved since
Qt 4.1:

- Widget stylability:  Easy customization and stylability of widgets
through a Cascading Style Sheets-like syntax
- Visual enhancements to Mainwindow
- Re-introduced system tray support on all platforms
- Completion framework: Set up completions and use them in QLineEdit,
QComboBox and your own widgets
- Undo/redo framework
- Enhanced HTML import and export functionality
- FileSystemWatcher: Receive notification about changes to files or
directories

For a more detailed description about the preview and the mentioned areas
above please consult qt4-2-intro.html found in doc/html.

Supported Platforms

The Technology Preview has been not been tested on the entire range of
platforms targeted by the final Qt 4.2 release. The following platforms are
supported:

  - GNU/Linux with gcc 3.4 or later on Intel x86
  - Mac OS X 10.4 with the native gcc compiler
  - Microsoft Windows 2000 and later with MSVC 2003 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 Q3, 2006 and release the final Qt 4.2 in
early Q4, 2006.

Enjoy the Technology Preview. We hope you will have as much fun and
pleasure experimenting with Qt 4.2 as we had designing and building it.

--The Trolltech Qt Team