In the spirit of doing releases and more specifically, Jasons doing releases (or at least blogging about them), I am happy to present to you the latest release of the Qt for S60 port! Go ahead, download it in the background while you keep reading:
Following fresh on the heels of the Qt 4.5.0 release, our latest release, commonly referred to as "Garden", is a real showcase for all the hard work that we have done over the past 4 months. Espen set the bar pretty high when he mentioned our ambitions for Garden back in December, but I am quite proud to say that we pulled it all off in the end. One of the most obvious differences you'll notice from the previous (Temple) release is that this one is based on Qt 4.5. That means we got a bunch of performance improvements and other features practically for free!
One of the main goals of this release was to cleverly disguise Qt applications as native S60 applications and see if we could fool our grandmothers. This was no easy feat considering that S60 has interchangeable themes, input methods, and special menus and adding to that the fact that our previous release looked like a certain OS from 1995, we knew we had some work to do. Well, grandma put on her reading specs and fired up her XpressMusic 5800 to have a look and she was pleasantly surprised!
She immediately saw the application themed correctly and could input text like she did in other S60 applications (they call her "CrazyThumbs" at bingo) and after trying some other Qt applications she could use menus and even drag-n-drop worked! Well, needless to say she had no idea that she was using the same application framework that powered the desktop environment on her Linux box!
Ok, far fetched fantasies aside, there are tonnes of other improvements in the Garden release. We have rewritten large parts of our event loop and also QWidget so that QApplication and QWidgets can be easily embedded in native S60 applications. In fact, we even introduced a new static library called 'qtmain' to hijack the entry point and construct a full S60 application before calling an application's main() function. With the full S60 environment at our disposal we could start integrating with things like the status pane and menu pane thus making functions like QWidget::setWindowTitle() work properly. Finally, we ported a few new classes such as QLocale, QClipboard and QDesktopServices. There are lots of other things I could mention, but I don't want to steal all the joy from reading the changelog :)
To get you up and running with the build, here is Alessandro to explain the details:
Finally, here is a video from Espen where he takes you on a walk through the Garden (release):
The next steps for us will be to evaluate where we go next with the port. I won't cover that here today since it warrants a blog post of its own so I'll keep you in suspense. Enjoy!
Getting help and providing feedback
Pre-releases are not supported, but we still want your feedback of course. We have set up a special mailing list for feedback on the S60 port:
This list is read by the developers working on the port, so please join if you want to provide technical feedback, bug reports or suggestions to us directly. In order to join the mailing list send a mail to:
qts60-feedback-request@trolltech.com
There is also a Nokia Forum available here.
