Qt is now owned by Digia

Digia has finally finished the acquisition process of Qt from Nokia and now has the responsibility for Qt activities including product development and commercial and open source licensing. The website for Qt is now http://qt.digia.com.

This will ensure the future of Qt 5 and also KDE 5 which will be based on Qt 5. Some workers are enjoying this transition since they now have a company to pay for them, but some people (around 60) that used to work for Nokia in Brisbane, Australia is not that lucky.  Last month, Nokia shut down their office in Brisbane which was in charge of some Qt development and right now, they are jobless (some might already find another job currently). Hopefully they could find a better company that will hire them and use their wonderful skills and they can still contribute to Qt.

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