Qt 5.4 Beta Available

I am extremely happy to announce that Qt 5.4 Beta is now available for download. There are a lot of new and interesting things in Qt 5.4 and I will try to summarize the most important highlights in this blog post.

Powerful Web Offering with Qt WebEngine

As the importance of HTML5 has grown we want to provide the best support for HTML5 within the Qt technology offering. The Qt WebEngine, a long-term R&D project based on the Chromium web engine has now reached fully supported version on desktop and embedded platforms.

Qt WebEngine provides a convenient API for both Qt Widgets and Qt Quick for using the Chromium web engine. Besides plain web viewing purposes Qt WebEngine takes full benefit of the whole Qt graphics stack integration allowing you to mix and overlay native Qt controls with web contents and OpenGL shaders. Of course, the fact that Qt provides a full application framework around the web engine makes Qt WebEngine truly an unparalled web engine API.

The new Qt WebChannel module acts as the bridge between QML/C++ and HTML/JavaScript allowing you to expose QObjects into the web context.

For platforms that do not allow distribution of Qt WebEngine as well as use cases where a full-blown web engine is not needed Qt 5.4 will introduce a technology preview of a new module called Qt WebView. It supports embedding the native web engines of the underlying operating system into Qt, and is currently available for Android and iOS. Because of this, Qt WebView also gives a convenient light-weight solution for simple web document integration. Qt WebView will be available with Qt 5.4 final as a separate add-on.

Qt 5.4 also contains Qt WebKit. It is still supported, but as of Qt 5.4 we consider it done, so no new functionality will be added to it. We are also planning to deprecate Qt WebKit in future releases, as the new Qt WebEngine provides what is needed. In most use cases, migrating from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine is rather straightforward.

Complete Support for Windows Runtime – Use Qt for Windows Store Apps

The Windows Runtime port of Qt saw its first supported beta release with Qt 5.3. With all the feedback we have improved the port a lot and implemented most of the missing APIs. With Qt 5.4 WinRT is now fully supported as a primary deployment platform.

Qt 5.4 provides support for most of the Qt functionality on WinRT, including for example Qt Quick and Qt Quick Controls, Qt Quick Compiler, Multimedia, Positioning, Network (also SSL/TLS), Core and GUI. With Qt for WinRT port you are now able to target Windows Store Apps: Windows Phone 8.1 and above and Windows tablets with the Modern UI and publish your applications in the Windows Store.

New License Terms – Introducing LGPLv3

As announced earlier, the open-source version for Qt 5.4 is also made available under the LGPLv3 license. The new licensing option allows us at The Qt Company to introduce more value-add components for the whole Qt ecosystem without making compromises on the business side.

Through this dual-licensing model, with Qt 5.4 timeframe we are introducing technology previews for the light-weight cross-platform WebView and the 3D Canvas. Similarly the new Qt WebEngine and Android style are available only through a commercial Qt license and under GPL and LGPLv3 for the open-source users.

To find out the best licensing option for you, please see the new licensing page and the downloads page.

HighDPI Support, Dynamic GL and Other Improvements for Windows Users

In addition to WinRT, Qt 5.4 brings many other improvements to Windows users. Qt 5.4 brings support for High DPI displays. A typical 4K monitor may have 3840x2160 pixels, a logical resolution of 192 DPI, whereas older monitors have around 1920x1080 pixels at 96 DPI. Qt maintains the font point size on a 4K monitor, resulting the text being drawn as indented for a 96 DPI layout. With Qt 5.4 we have especially worked for enabling the HighDPI support for Windows – in addition to improving it in other platforms such as Mac and X11.

HighDPI support is still considered experimental in Qt 5.4, and needs to be enabled via an environment variable. If you are interested in the HighDPI support, check out the overview documentation.

Qt 5.4 brings capability to dynamically select during the application startup whether to use ANGLE or OpenGL on Windows. It is possible to use either opengl32.dll or ANGLE’s OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation in Qt applications without the need for two separate builds of the binaries. This significantly simplifies the task of creating Qt Quick applications for Windows PCs. Dynamic GL switching is not yet enabled in the prebuilt Qt 5.4 Beta binaries. In addition to these, there is a large number of smaller improvements and bug fixes for the Windows port in Qt 5.4.

Other Graphics Improvements

There are quite many important graphics improvements in Qt 5.4 in addition to improved HighDPI support and dynamic GL switching on Windows. One of the most important ones is QOpenGLWidget, the modern replacement for the old QGLWidget class from Qt 4. QOpenGLWidget is a new widget for showing OpenGL rendered content, which can be used like any other QWidget. This also allows us to deprecate old Qt OpenGL module, as everything it does and more is now provided by the other modules.

Qt 5.4 also brings new QQuickRenderControl API, which allows efficient rendering of Qt Quick 2 scenes into framebuffer objects. The contents can then be used in arbitrary ways in Qt-based or 3rd party OpenGL renderers. With Qt 5.4 you can also adopt and wrap existing OpenGL contexts in QOpenGLContext. This improves the ability to embed Qt content for use in other rendering engines. In addition to other new graphics APIs Qt 5.4 brings convenient QOpenGLWindow and QRasterWindow classes as well as introduces support for 10-bit per color channel images.

QOpenGLContext is now able to adopt existing native contexts (EGL, GLX, …). This allows interoperability between Qt and other frameworks, such as game engines. Read more from this blog post.

Bluetooth Low Energy

Qt 5.4 provides a technology preview implementation of Bluetooth Low Energy, which allows communication to a lot of smart sensors and gadgets such as wearables. It is initially supported for BlueZ 4 and 5 on Linux only – support for platforms such as iOS and Android will be added in upcoming Qt versions. With Qt 5.4 we implement the BTLE central role as per Bluetooth spec 4.0, i.e. at the moment you can only create the client for BTLE.

If you are interested in BTLE, please check the Qt Bluetooth LE Overview. We are very much interested in receiving feedback from users to be able to move beyond tech preview state.

Faster Startup, Smaller Deployment Packages and Native Style for Android

We have worked actively to improve support for Qt on Android and there are many important new Android specific items in Qt 5.4. There is now support for QML import scanner, which helps in optimizing the package size for deployment. With the pre-generated assets cache that improves application start-up time introduced in Qt 5.3 and the Qt Quick Compiler available in the commercial editions, it is possible to start Qt for Android applications in a breeze.

On the user interface side we have extended the styling capabilities of Qt Quick and added support to Android style, which enables native look for Widgets and the Qt Quick Controls on Android. In previous versions of Qt it was possible to style Widgets to look native on Android only if one used Ministro. Now both the Widgets and Qt Quick Controls, i.e. buttons, sliders, progress bars and other controls and widgets you use in your application, will look native on Android by default.

iOS Improvements

Support for iOS is improved with Qt 5.4 which contains many important fixes for iOS 8 and Xcode 6. In addition to smaller improvements and bug fixes there are also some new features such as a touch-based text selection model. Instead of the previous desktop like approach (press-and-drag), you can now do press-and-hold to select text. Qt will give you selection handles that can be dragged and a popup text edit menu, like with native apps. The edit menu can also be customized from Qt Quick controls.

Work has also been started to improve usage of native menus in general. In addition to the edit menu mentioned above, Qt 5.4 now uses a native pickerview menu for many of the Qt Quick Controls that have a menu attached. A lot of work has also gone into improving and stabilizing code that deals with window, screen and orientation geometry, and virtual keyboard management.

Support for Mac OS X 10.10, Code Signing and other Mac Improvements

Our Mac users get greatly improved support for new Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite with Qt 5.4. We have worked hard to improve and fix styling and other issues with Mac OS X 10.10 for Qt 5.4. Applications created with earlier Qt versions work on the upcoming Mac OS X 10.10, but there may be some issues in styling depending on your application. In addition to OS X 10.10 support we have fixed many customer reported Mac bugs in Qt 5.4 Beta – and we continue to provide more fixes still before the final is out.

One very important improvement in Qt 5.4 is support to new code signing style required by OS X 10.10 (and 10.9.5) for applications published in the Mac AppStore. These are still partially work in progress, but the initial support is included already to the Qt 5.4 beta release and polished for the Qt 5.4.0 final release.

Wacom tablets, Wayland, Updated Qt Creator and Other Items

Support for Wacom tablets has been improved and unified across platforms in Qt 5.4 with the help and support by KDE/Krita developers. QTabletEvent now has information about which stylus buttons are pressed, rotation and tangentialPressure have consistent ranges across platforms and proximity events include the type of stylus or other tool in use. With these changes there is one less obstacle to upgrade to Qt 5.

Qt 5.4 now includes the Qt Wayland module. This enables you to run Qt applications on Weston, the reference compositor for Wayland. Weston and Wayland support is still in its early stages, and does not yet provide a full featured desktop environment that you get with Windows, Cocoa and xcb. However, Weston and Wayland already provide a light-weight windowing system that might be desirable to use in the embedded space. Qt Wayland module is delivered as source code only. We will continue our focus on improving our support for Wayland in Qt especially for device creation.

Qt 5.4 Beta packages include the updated Qt Creator 3.2.2 providing improvements for example to Xcode 6 and iOS Simulator usage.

I have listed some of the highlights of Qt 5.4, but many things are not mentioned. For more details, please check What is new with Qt 5.4 – or take Qt 5.4 Beta for a spin and see for yourself.

Get Qt 5.4 Beta Today

Qt 5.4 Beta is now available, for existing Qt users, through your Qt Account, or from the Qt Project download server for open-source packages. Please download, try it out and send us feedback through the mailing lists or bug reports.