As we’re now shipping the beta version of Qt 4.7 - I want to share a bit of our future product plans, including some changes we're implementing. The Qt Quick journey so far has been pretty amazing, going from being a technology that few understood or embraced, to cautious optimism and more recently a more insatiable pull and momentum building up around the Alpha version we released back in March.
There are already a number of examples of how cool apps you can build with Qt Quick. For instance there is Ryan Paul’s RSS feed wall example:
Digia also built a complete Connected Car demo:
And, the Qt sources come with a huge number of examples and demos in $QTDIR/examples/declarative and $QTDIR/demos/declarative respectively. On the right is a screen-cast to show ze lazy ones, but in the Declarative UI category here on Labs you'll also find a lot of Treats.
There are some brave souls out there as well, who recognize the value Qt Quick offers; allowing an exceptional level of differentiation in the User Experience - agile turnaround in the UI design and having designers and developers work tightly and effectively together - talking the same language and working in the same environment. We’ll see hands-on examples from these once they are ready to display their wares - but not yet; we’re preparing some awesome show-cases to feast on for the launch party.
As part of developing Qt Quick we have been working with our friends at Intel through MeeGo and with Nokia's internal design groups. They have found that Qt Quick allows them to have a fluid transition from prototype to production code. But, bringing a new technology to market is always hard. Working with these teams has made it apparent that a visual editor needs to be exceptionally good to be useful to visual designers. Because of this it has been decided to just offer the visual editor as a technical preview till we can get it to reach the high standards we expect from ourselves, something that will happen later this year.
We would love for you to enable the Preview Qt Quick Designer, put it through it’s paces, and provide feedback as to how you would like to see it evolve - preferably as new suggestion tasks at bugreports using component ‘Qml Support’. But that’s not all the news about Qt Quick; we made Qt Creator ready for prime-time with added support for Qt Quick; New Qt Quick Project Wizard, QML Syntax Highlighting, QML Code completion, Documentation integration, Object Inspector and Integration with the qml launcher for ‘running’ QML files. So, if you’re a technical Graphic Designer or UX Engineer, you’ll find ample support in Qt Creator for the best thing since sliced bread!
To enter the Cult of QML, please sign up to the Qt QML mailing list at qt-qml@trolltech.com and join us on #qt-qml at irc.freenode.org!
