Qt 4.8 Released

Nokia has announced the next major release of Qt 4.8 libraries to all platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac). This release incorporated a lot of new improvements and also bringing it closer to Qt 5 which will be released next year.

Here are some highlights that you can expect from Qt 4.8:

• The Qt Platform Abstraction (the outcome of the lighthouse project) provides you with a clean abstraction layer that makes it easier to port QtGui to new windowing systems.
• Qt Quick improvements Qt 4.8 speeds up Qt Quick UI design and app development with ready-made components and features such as Right-To-Left support, Support for split-screen virtual keyboard as well as a pinch area to provide a declarative API for handling touch input.
• Qt WebKit 2.2.1. The Qt 4.8 release features an updated version of QtWebKit from the WebKit project, including a wide range of improvements to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies.
• Threaded Open GL in Qt 4.8 makes it much easier, and more thread safe, to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently (and avoid the main thread being blocked while the GPU is doing its thing)
• Multithreaded HTTP HTTP requests are now handled in a separate thread by default. This should make application guis smoother, as networking will no longer use the main event loop.
• Optimized file system access. Better I/O performance, achieved by reducing the number of system calls performed for I/O and by better use of cached data, when available

So, what are you waiting for? Go Get Them