Trolltech Brings Style Sheets to Desktop Applications with Qt 4.2

Trolltech, the company that makes software faster to build and easier to use, today released Qt 4.2, the new version of the company's popular framework for high performance cross-platform application development. This version significantly expands the scope of the framework, providing the C++ community with more functionality and innovation than ever before.

This version includes a number of improvements and performance optimizations, such as:

* Enhanced widget styleability, more UI control – The Qt 4.2 widget style system enables an unrivaled control over application look and feel. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a powerful technology that until now has allowed for effortless customizability of applications for the web. Qt 4.2's widget style sheets take an innovative approach to CSS, bringing the same level of low-effort styleability and customizability to the desktop. Using a syntax similar to CSS, developers, designers and end users can control the style of individual widgets, allowing rapid development and customization of visually compelling user interfaces.

* New, advanced 2D canvas - The new Graphics View enables construction of high performance interactive applications handling millions of 2D graphics objects. Features such as collision detection, multiple views, zooming and panning, coordinate and individual item transforms, the ability to group items and printing facilities are already built in.

Graphics View supersedes the very popular Canvas module from Qt 3 and adds significant new functionality and enhancements in the areas of item interaction, optimized level-of-detail rendering, affine item transformations, control over animations and drag-and-drop.

* Qt/Mac look and feel improvements - The Macintosh version of Qt 4.2 incorporates a number of look and feel improvements. Dialogs now transparently support the Mac's native button layouts with the QDialogButtonBox class, and Qt now provides access to the Mac OS X's Find clipboard. It is now possible to host Carbon controls in Qt windows and vice versa.

* Tighter integration with the GNOME desktop environment - Qt 4.2 allows developers to create Qt plug-ins for use with non-Qt applications. The tighter integration with the GNOME desktop environment is the result of The Portland Project, a working group dedicated to better interoperability between KDE and GNOME in order to establish a greater presence for Linux in the desktop market.

"Qt 4.2 and the Graphics View will appeal to a wide range of development organizations in verticals such as EDA, visualization, oil and gas and medical devices," said Naren Karattup, Product Director—Development Tools, Trolltech. "The Graphics View framework elegantly solves a general problem, namely how to unite the conflicting demands of efficiency, minimal resource use and feature richness while displaying and manipulating large numbers of 2D objects. Qt 4.2 however also contains a large number of user-suggested improvements, new features and architectural improvements that will help boost the productivity of Qt users everywhere".

Qt is used by thousands of companies worldwide for desktop applications ranging from visualization and complex modeling to mission-critical applications such as air traffic control and space flight simulation modules. Developers who develop cross-platform and rich client applications can draw from a library of more than 400 fully object-oriented classes, including classes for GUI, layout, database, internationalization, networking, XML, and much more.

For a demo of Graphics View, please visit: http://www.trolltech.com/GraphicsView