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I hope you had a summer as great as we had in Berlin so far. We had awesome weather most of time with almost constant sunshine. Still we weren't lazy, and worked on the next Qt Creator release. We are happy to give you a preview of some of the features that will be in 1.3 with a Technology Snapshot release.
Renaming in Action
Technology Snapshot is just our way of saying: This is not a proper fully tested release, it might not work perfectly, it might crash and it's using Qt 4.6, which just released its Technology Preview. But we spent quite a lot of time on stabilizing and fixing regressions. I would recommend you to actually try it out. Me personally, I'm pretty happy with the release.
Now on to the fun part, the new features. I've selected a few things I'd like to highlight, and wow our changelog for 1.3 is already pretty long.
So one important change is that we by default use jom instead of nmake for projects compiled with Microsoft's Visual Studio Compiler. Jom is not yet completely bug free, so if you have any problems with jom, please send us feedback. You can switch back to using nmake in the Settings under Tools/Options/ProjectExplorer. So why Jom? Jom automatically parallizes your build to use all your cores. It can easily make your build take half the time. See the Jom labs page
Also for our users using the Microsoft tool chain, the debugger support was improved.
Our C++ editor now highlights all uses of the symbol under the cursor,
e.g. allowing you to see with one glance where a variable is used in a function. Also you can rename symbols now with Ctrl+Shift+R. Currently it only works for local symbols, but for 1.3 we hope to have it working for more symbols. But still it's useful already, and having the renaming inline instead of popping up a dialog feels really nice.
Another small feature worth mentioning in the code editor is completion for #include.
We also spend some effort in making the cmake plugin better. Some of the new features actually require a not yet released cmake version. Thanks to Christian who reviewed and applied a few patches I wrote for cmake.
With cmake cvs you'll see all cmake files in the project tree and you can on windows use the Microsoft tool chain. We also fixed quite a few bugs and generally it should now be more useable. Though as always feedback on what you are missing most is welcome.
Creator new projects mode
For the Qt project manager, we made the qmake step and make steps optional, so those who want to use a different build tool in conjunction with .pro files, can do so. Also Creator tries to be smarter about when to not run qmake.
You can check out from different source control system from the File/New Wizard. That also includes gitorious. We also have a new project pane, shown on the right.
We made the Ui scale better to lower resolutions, so all Netbook users should download this release.
You can download:
Yet it's still warm here in Berlin, and we haven't frozen yet, in fact one feature that we are secretly developing in our public repository is obvious if you either follow our commit log or which new platform is going to be supported by Qt 4.6.
Edit: You should rebuild your debugging helper libraries in Tools/Options/Qt Versions. The ones from 1.2 aren't compatible with 1.2.90, we are going to add a version check for that.
