It's time to celebrate - Qt 4.6.0 is now available.
You can get all of the packages from the Qt Download Page. Qt 4.6.0 is available as a single source package for all supported platforms and as pre-built binary packages for Windows (Visual Studio 2008 and MinGW builds), Mac OS X (Cocoa and Carbon builds), and Symbian.
You can also find the latest documentation at http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6/index.html.
Nine months ago, I sat in an office in Oslo, Norway, writing a blog about the Qt 4.5.0 release (my first as Release Manager) as the snow fell gently, but persistently outside. Today, I'm sitting in a (thankfully air-conditioned) office in Brisbane, Australia, writing a blog about the Qt 4.6.0 release as the 35 degree (Centigrade) sun beats down mercilessly upon everything outside.
That freezing cold day in Oslo seems like a lot more than nine months ago. A lot has changed in the last nine months - not just the environment that I walk through to get to work.
A bunch of new features have reached maturity and found their way into Qt 4.6.0, the port to the Symbian platform has enabled Qt to run on potentially tens of millions of devices, a few more long term projects have started to bear fruit (and will find their way into future version of Qt), and Qt development has been opened up to the community with both the Qt Source Repository and the Qt Bug Tracker going public.
This last item has had a significant and very positive impact on the way we work and on the quality of today's 4.6.0 release. Qt 4.6.0 has benefitted from around 160 code contributions from members of the community, as well as hundreds of bug reports.
Today is far from the end of the road for Qt 4.6 development however. While the feature set is now complete - the next chance to add significant new features is 4.7.0 - we still intend to continue to improve performance, fix bugs, improve documentation and address feedback from the community in future 4.6.x patch releases. While it hasn't been possible to address all of the feedback we've received so far in time for 4.6.0, Qt's developers are already busily working towards 4.6.1 and the feedback and contributions from Qt's community of users is still helping us to improve Qt for all users.
If you find a bug in Qt 4.6.0, please tell us about it so that we can make Qt even better next time around. You can submit a bug report and/or an autotest that demonstrates the bug via the Qt Bug Tracker, or if you know how to fix the bug, you can submit a merge-request to the Qt source repository on http://qt.gitorious.org.
Tradition has it that for a .0 release, we show you the hard-working developers, testers and support staff that made the release happen. Below you can see the folks from the Oslo and Berlin Qt offices photographed outside at the beginning of another cold northern winter, and the folks from the Brisbane Qt office photographed in the canteen with the bright summer sun outside. (Better picture of the Munich team coming soon.)
Despite the geographical distances between our three development groups, something that has really impressed me during the last nine months is how well we've all worked together to create Qt 4.6.0, and for that I thank each and every one of the fine ladies and gentlemen pictured below. These are the people who come to work day after day to make Qt such a great framework for application development.
Great job guys and girls. Crack open your favourite celebratory beverage while we wait to see if Norway's internet is up to the challenge of distributing the biggest Qt release yet....
