Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 betas, include Symbian support

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Nokia today released betas for Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3, both of which include Symbian support. Qt is Nokia's cross platform application and UI framework, which is set to become a key developer offering in the Symbian and Maemo platforms. Qt Creator is a cross platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Qt developers.

In this beta release of Qt 4.6 the focus has been on 'stabilizing the Symbian port, as well as adding a backend for the Phonon multimedia library enabling simple audio and video playback'. The release will work on phones running S60 3.1, 3.2 or 5.0 (S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 or 2, or S60 5th Edition).

The Qt Creator 1.3 beat includes support for development targeting Symbian platform. Qt Creator will become an important IDE / developer tool for those wishing to target Symbian devices, especially with the release of Symbian^4 (early 2011), which sees Qt replace AVKON as Symbian's application framework.

If you would like to try out these demos on your own phone, visit this page for download and instructions.

More information on the Qt 4.6 beta for Symbian developers is available here.

The releases co-incide with the Qt Developer Days event, which is currently taking place in Berlin. The Qt Development Framework team have been posting images to Flickr, tweeting and blogging about the event.

Here's an extract from the press release:

"With community input in mind, development of the Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3 releases is focused around several key themes:

  • Allow Qt developers to target new platforms:  In addition to new support for Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6, Qt 4.6 introduces a port of Qt to the Symbian Platform with integration for the S60 framework.  Together with preliminary support in the Qt Creator IDE for Qt development targeting the Symbian platform, optimizations for the Linux/X11-based Maemo 6 platform and preview code for the newly announced Qt port to Maemo 5, this makes Qt a standard not only for desktop but now also for mobile development.
  • Create new and exciting user experiences: Qt 4.6 adds advanced graphics effects, a new animation framework and support for gesture-based and multi-touch input methods.
  • Deliver better application performance: Performance optimizations to key areas of Qt, a new JavaScriptCore based backend for QtScript as part of an updated Qt WebKit Integration, and new support for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics using OpenVG will make Qt 4.6 the best-performing Qt version ever."

More information is available on the Qt website and on the newly created Qt official blog.