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Welcome to the Qt 4 Technology Preview

Dear Qt user,

This is a Technology Preview release: a code snapshot that we are making available to our customers. We're doing this because we want to show you some of the new technologies that will go into the final Qt 4 release, and because we want you to have the opportunity to give us your feedback. The feedback we receive will help us to ensure that the final Qt 4 release provides as much value and productivity as possible.

Qt 4 still is in a very active state of development. Not everything is ready for prime time, and there are significant omissions.

Most importantly, this Technology Preview is not meant to be used in production code or even for application development. Furthermore, please do not attempt to start porting your Qt 3 based projects over yet. Not all backwards compatibility functionality is in place yet, and we have not yet finished the porting guide and the porting tools that will help you with the process once the Qt 4 final release is imminent.

What you can do is write new small programs to experience what the next generation of Qt programming with be like. In particular, there are five new technologies that we hope you will try out and give us feedback on. All are new to Qt, written specifically for Qt 4:

  1. Tulip, a new set of template container classes.
  2. Interview, a model/view architecture for item views.
  3. Arthur, the Qt 4 painting framework.
  4. Scribe, the Unicode text renderer with a public API for performing low-level text layout.
  5. A modern action-based mainwindow, toolbar, menu, and docking architecture.

Follow the hyperlinks above for a detailed description for each of the five areas, including the current state of development and our plans for the final release. See also Getting Started with Qt 4 for an overview of the main portability issues.

This is a preview of some of the Qt 4 libraries, not of the entire application development framework. Most notably, new versions of Qt Designer and Qt Linguist are not included. But we do ship a version of uic that allows you to experiment with .ui files generated by the Qt 3 Designer. We also ship a ported version of Assistant to make it easier to read the online documentation provided with this package, although the Qt 4 documentation itself is still far from complete.

The Technology Preview is meant to be tested on a limited set of platforms only, not the entire range of platforms targeted by the final Qt product. The Technology Preview supports:

Other operating systems and compilers might work but are not yet part of the testing program.

How to provide feedback

Trolltech has set up a special mailing list, qt4-preview-feedback, for discussion of Qt Technology Preview-related issues. To subscribe, send a message containing just the word "subscribe" (without the quotes) to qt4-preview-feedback-request@trolltech.com. We encourage you to use this mailing list instead of qt-interest for preview-specific issues. See http://lists.trolltech.com/ for more information on Trolltech's mailing lists, including archived discussions.

Roadmap

Depending on the feedback from this Technology Preview, we will provide a second Preview in Q3 2004, enter the beta phase in Q4 2004 and release the final Qt 4 in late Q1 2005.

Enjoy the Technology Preview: We hope you will have as much fun and pleasure experimenting with it as we had designing and building it.

--The Trolltech Qt 4 Team


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