Qt for Maemo 5 going Beta

We're happy to announce that Qt for Maemo 5 entered Beta status - this means that all APIs are feature complete and have been reviewed by multiple people. For us, this means that an intense phase of bug hunting and testing is starting. For you, it means that you can now finally develop without us changing class names or behavior all the time (*) :)

Lots of changes went into Qt since the last Technical Preview:

• Support for NEON instructions for increased drawing speed
• Refactored Kinetic Scrolling
  • Kinetic Scrolling now default for all QAbstractScrollArea and QWebView based widgets
  • QMaemo5KineticScroller is not needed anymore and was removed. To override scrolling behavior or to disable it altogether, QAbstractKineticScroller can be used
  • Take a look at the kinetic scroller example (examples/maemo5/scroller) for information on how to tweak scrolling
• Lots of styling fixes
• QtMultimedia got an N900 backend
• Documentation now online at http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-maemo-4.6/
• New Maemo 5 specific examples:
  • Showing Banners and Notes
  • Using list pick selectors and value buttons
  • Dynamically rotate UIs
  • Creating Stacked Windows
  • Using Maemo 5 specific Window States
  • Grabbing the device's zoom buttons

How do I get it?

Short story: Add Maemo's "extras-devel" repository and type "fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-maemo5-dev". Qt will be installed to "/opt/qt4-maemo5". The long story can be found on the wiki.

The source code repository is at http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/x11-maemo. Check out "README.maemo5" for build instructions.

How to contact us?

You can reach us via the "qt-maemo-feedback" mailing list (see Mailing List instructions), or on the "#qt-maemo" IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. For bug reports, you can use our bug tracking system at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/. Please set the bug's component to "Maemo 5".

How to debug

The current Maemo 5 SDK still contains gdb 6.8, which is unstable when debugging Qt applications. gdb 7 is scheduled for the next release, in the meantime, you can find a custom package at http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/gdb7/. gdb 7.0 is installed as "gdb7" (note the "7" suffix) to /usr/local/bin, so it won't clash with the existing gdb. Once gdb 7 support lands in the official SDK, you can safely uninstall our package.

How about QtDeclarative?

QtDeclarative is available for Maemo 5 ("fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-maemo5-declarative-dev"), but is still considered a technology preview.

How about Qt Creator or MADDE?

Unfortunately, neither full Qt Creator nor MADDE support is available for this Beta. Currently, the ScratchBox based SDK is the only supported development environment.

Curtain Call

A big thank you goes to the Qt and KDE communities for all the patches, reports and discussions. A big hand also for Kevin Ottens for his Virtual Machine which accelerates Qt and KDE for Maemo development quite a bit.

(*) read/only QComboBox might change into a value picker button