14 DAY TRIAL // The Qt Company, through Jani Heikkinen, has announced the general availability of the Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Qt 5.7 open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.
Qt 5.7.0 Release Candidate arrives one and a half months after the Beta version, introducing a huge number of new features and improvements to most of the existing modules, among which we can mention support for a port of the Qt NFC API (Application Programming Interface) to Google's Android mobile operating system.
Support for Apple's tvOS operating system for Apple TV devices, along with an enhanced version of the QML playlist API, has landed for the Qt Multimedia module. Various new embedded platforms will be supported as well in Qt 5.7.0, such as the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer, but only in 32-bit mode.
Moreover, the Nvidia DRIVE CX boards powered by Nvidia's Tegra X1 SoC for AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) hardware will be supported in Qt 5.7, along with devices based on the NXP i.MX7 multicore processors. However, the latter doesn't yet have GPU support, so they will use the Qt Quick 2D Renderer and Linux framebuffer (LinuxFB).
Final Qt 5.7.0 release coming in a few weeks
Among other interesting features coming to Qt 5.7, we can mention the rebase of the Qt WebEngine module to the open-source Chromium 49 web browser, the enablement of the JIT (Just In Time) compilation for 64-bit ARM Linux systems, as well as 64-bit and 32-bit WinRT platforms.
There are numerous other improvements and new features implemented in the Qt 5.7 release, which should hit the stable channel in a few weeks. Until then, you can study the preliminary release notes, which include most of the new features coming to the final version.
Also, if you can't wait any longer, you can download the Qt 5.7.0 RC (Release Candidate) source and binary builds for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via our website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not ready for production use.