Qt 5.0 Release Candidate

I'm very happy to announce that the first release candidate for Qt 5.0.0 has just been released.

Since the release of the second beta around 4 weeks ago we've made tremendous progress in stabilizing Qt and getting all the remaining pieces in place. While we have over the last couple of weeks fixed hundreds of bugs in the code base, most of the focus has actually been on polishing the usability of the product. The product structure and feature set is pretty much what we already have announced with the second beta. But apart from pure bug fixes there are still a couple of things that are new.

We have been completely restructuring the Qt documentation to make it easier to access. Please have a look and check out the new docs. We hope that they will make it easier to find your way and access the information you're searching for.

The examples have also received a lot of love to make sure it is easy to get started with Qt. They can be easily accessed, build and launched from Qt Creator's Welcome screen.

A final set of a few additional API changes has also made it into the release candidate. This release fixes the API set for Qt 5.0. Between now and the final release we will only make very minor adjustments to the API.

All of these change classes and methods that have been introduced with Qt 5.0, and with thus not affect you if you are porting your application from Qt 4. The list of changes from Qt 4 are described in the changelog. We have worked hard to keep that set of changes as small as possible so that it is very easy to bring your application over to Qt 5.

We are feeling confident that the release candidate is getting pretty close to the Qt 5.0 final release and would thus like to invite you all to give it a try. Please use the time now to report any issues you find back to us. There are a few bugs and problems we know about. You can find those at the known issues page.

We're aiming to move towards a 5.0.0 final release as quickly as possible now. If we don't hear about or find any large issues with the release candidate, we hope to be able to release it as 5.0.0 in about a week from now. Otherwise, we are aiming at fixing the bugs that show up and release a new RC in maybe a week from now.

Enjoy!