14 DAY TRIAL // Qt 5.4 Alpha, a cross-platform application and UI framework with APIs for C++ programming, is now ready for download and testing.
The Digia developers have had great success with the 5.3 release, which was made back in May, and since then a huge number of changes have been made. The changelog for the upcoming 5.4 version is even bigger than the one for 5.3.
So many modifications to the Qt packages done in just a few months will definitely impact some of the projects that are actively using Qt. Ubuntu developers, for example, have just agreed to implement the 5.3 branch into the new Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) – anything newer than that won't make it in.
So many changes, so little time
"As always, the Alpha is in source code only. Binary installers will be available in a few weeks with the Beta release. Features of Qt 5.4 are now frozen and in the next months the focus is in finalising and polishing functionality," says Digia's Tuukka Turunen.
As you would expect, some of the most important changes made to the Qt packages are for the Windows platform, which is one of the biggest users of this particular toolkit. The support for WinRT has been improved and polished, and Windows Phone 8.1 is now the minimum supported version.
According to the changelog, QOpenGLWidget has been added (modern replacement for the old QGLWidget), the QQuickRenderControl API, which allows efficient rendering of Qt Quick 2 scenes into framebuffer objects, has been added, the styling capabilities of Qt Quick have been expanded, support has been added to the Android style, Qt Bluetooth now supports Bluez5, and the new Qt WebEngine has been implemented, integrating the comprehensive web capabilities of Chromium 37 into Qt.
Also, the Qt WebChannel module for integration of QML/C++ and HTML/JavaScript is now available, WebKit is still present, but it will no longer be updated, a class for providing information about currently mounted storage volumes and drives has been added, the scaling of widget styles based on DPI is now much better, Tech Preview of Bluetooth Low Energy has been added, and the Wayland platform plugin is now part of the release.
A complete list of changes and fixes can be found in the official announcement. You can download Qt 5.4 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.