Qt Creator 2.1 beta

Just in time for the Developer Days in Munich we bring you the beta release of Qt Creator 2.1. You can catch some of us at the Developer Days. Erik will be presenting: "Getting the Most out of Qt Creator". And you'll probably see Qt Creator in action in some of the presentations, e.g. in "The Nokia Qt SDK in Action" or "Meet Qt Quick".

One big theme of the Developer Days is Qt Quick. Incidentally we've worked hard to make Qt Quick development easier, productive and fun for you. For Qt Creator 2.1 we have the following new features:

  • A fancy Quick Editing Toolbar
    The toolbar makes it easier to edit properties like colors, text or gradients.
  • A QML JS Debugger
  • QML snippets
  • QML code refactoring
  • The Visual Designer is enabled by default.

We've also made it easier to get started with Mobile Development by providing "New Project Wizards". The Mobile Wizard and the new Qt Quick Application Wizard deploy correctly to both the N900 and Symbian devices and include some boring code for stuff you'll likely need.

The Qt Quick wizard also includes some helper code for the QML JS Debugger, which is by default disabled. To enable it, edit the .pro file and do a clean rebuild. That feature is still work in progress, and it certainly needs some polish.

I'm pretty sure some of you still wonder how Qt Quick will affect you. Well my advice is to try Qt 4.7 and Qt Creator 2.1 and have some fun exploring an awesome technology.

Qt Creator 2.1 also brings many improvements to other areas. For example on C++ code model side:

  • An improved C++ parser that is even faster and uses less memory
  • A class view, contributed by Denis Mingulov. Thank you. See the screenshot to the right
  • Semantic highlighting for virtual methods, locals, statics and member variables
  • New C++ refactoring actions, e.g. for generating local declarations or for declaring functions. To invoke the refactoring action, press Alt+Enter. There is no visual indication where you can refactor, though
  • A new indenter which has more options and understands your code better
  • A C++ outline view of your current file

As always, there are too many changes to even mention all of the major ones, and there are countless small polishing changes that should help you. There are around 3000 commits since 2.0.1 and almost 4000 since 2.0.0, so let me mention randomly a few of the smaller changes: the Git plugin received some polish, Maemo deployment is much better, better code completion for Symbian, sharing the selection between FakeVim and normal mode, more consistent capitalization in the UI, a wizard to help you add libraries to your .pro file, the generic highlighter, linking failed QObject::connect warnings in the application output to the source, debugger polishing, accepting filename:line-number on the command line, and an Image View (contributed by Denis Mingulov).

We welcome any feedback via:

There were countless small improvements to Creator contributed from externals. Thank you!

And last but not least, the actual download link. Have fun. :)


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