14 DAY TRIAL // Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia announced today the launch of Qt 4.6, the latest flavor of its cross-platform application and UI framework. According to the company, the new release comes around with new platform support and powerful new graphical capabilities, as well as with support for multi-touch gestures. Moreover, Qt 4.6 is set to offer a much easier solution for the development of applications and devices, the company stated.
“Qt 4.6 marks an exciting time for developers, regardless of their target form factor or platform,” commented Sebastian Nystrom, vice president, Application Services and Frameworks at Nokia. “Developers can easily create visually appealing and web-connected applications for desktops or devices, including targeting the hundreds of millions of Symbian and Maemo-based devices. The community will enjoy using Qt's intuitive programming interface to quickly create powerful, appealing applications,” he also added.
The new Qt 4.6 features support for a larger number of platforms, including the Symbian OS, which sees support in the app for the first time, and Windows 7 and Apple Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), not to mention the upcoming Maemo 6 operating system. Moreover, it also comes with “community support for real-time operating systems QNX and VxWorks,” Nokia says, adding that it is currently working on offering support for Maemo 5 in Qt 4.6.
“Qt support for Symbian and Maemo creates the first opportunity for developers to target both of these platforms from the same codebase. Being able to share code across platforms means that the applications they create will reach the market faster and reach a broader audience of device users. Also released today is a technology preview of new Qt APIs from the Qt Mobility project. These cross-platform APIs provide developers with functionality such as location for navigation-type devices, as well as messaging, contacts, and bearer management,” the company said.
Nokia also notes that the new Qt 4.6 has been built upon the 4.5 enhancements, and sports new Animation Framework; graphics effects like opacity, drop shadows, glow, and filtering; support for multi-touch application development; enhanced performance levels; optimized Qt GraphicsView rendering algorithm, a new WebKit, OpenGL paint engine, 2D vector graphic support using OpenVG, DirectFB support; updated Qt Creator (Qt Creator 1.3 and Qt 4.6 are included in the Qt SDK).
Additional details and downloadable packages are available here.