Qt 5.3.1 Released

I am happy to announce that today we released Qt 5.3.1. Qt 5.3.0 has been well received with over 500.000 downloads in the first 5 weeks of release. I believe this new patch release is even better offering many improvements over Qt 5.3.0. As a patch release, it does not add new features, but various improvements and fixes. Qt Creator version 3.1.2 also released today, is packaged into the installers. For Qt Enterprise users we are providing a fully supported Qt Quick Compiler 1.0.0, as well as updates for Data Visualization (version 1.1) and Charts (version 1.4).

The focus of Qt 5.3 has been in stability and usability, and we have continued this trend with the improvements now released with Qt 5.3.1. Qt 5.3 introduced  a nice set of features, such as QQuickWidget, Qt WebSockets module, Purchasing API, Compiled Qt Quick, support for WinRT (and Windows Phone), as well as many others. Many of these features have been made even better in Qt 5.3.1 based on feedback received from customers and the whole Qt community.

Improvements in Qt 5.3.1

Overall Qt 5.3.1 contains more than 800 changes compared to Qt 5.3.0, and the most interesting ones depend on what you are creating and which platforms you are using, so I have listed some of the highlights:

  • Performance optimizations for Qt Quick Engine's JIT compiler code generation and important bug fixes, especially on ARM (QTBUG-39289)
  • QAbstractProxyModel::sibling to now works in the same manner as with Qt4
  • Many small fixes to Qt Quick Controls, for example to TableView, TabView, ComboBox and Calendar
  • QQuickWidget now works properly also with ANGLE (QTBUG-39699)
  • Qt Quick animations now work also with static builds (QTBUG-37341)
  • Fix for a regression of QPushButton with QMenu (QTBUG-38550)
  • Fix for a regression on Mac for passing click event to underlaying widget (QTBUG-39322)
  • Initial support for Mac OS X 10.10, more improvements will land on upcoming Qt releases
  • Positioning backend now available also for Windows Phone
  • Accessibility now works on Android also below API level 18 (QTBUG-39508)
  • Fix flashing white screen at startup/shutdown on Android (QTBUG-38960)
  • Support for upcoming Android L (QTBUG-39042)

Change logs of the most important new items are located within each module, and we have collected some of the Change files for Qt 5.3.1 into wiki.

You may also want to check the Known issues for Qt 5.3.1.

Qt Quick Compiler 1.0.0 - Startup is 30-40% Faster

The new Qt Quick Compiler we introduced with Qt Enterprise 5.3 is now available as a fully supported 1.0.0 version. The Qt Quick Compiler takes QML files and compiles them to native code improving run-time performance on operating systems where one cannot use a just-in-time compiler, such as iOS and WinRT.

The compiler is also very useful for improving the load times of QML, as all of the parsing work now happens at compile time. This is especially interesting for startup times of applications and boot times of devices using Qt Quick for the user interface. Our measurements indicate that a typical mid-sized Qt Quick application startup is 30-40% faster with compiled Qt Quick. This is an excellent improvement and we believe we can improve this even more in the future. The highest startup time improvements we've gotten are as high as 90% in the case where the application is very JavaScript intense and contains no other items, like graphics, to load at startup.

Qt Quick Compiler is also very beneficial for keeping your source code safe, as it is now no longer necessary to ship the sources of your QML-based application. This makes Qt Quick to be on par with IP protection compared to C++, which is greatly appreciated in many industries.

Qt Creator 3.1.2

The installer packages also include Qt Creator 3.1.2, which provides a set of bug fixes and improvements, for example:

  • Fix of a crash in editing with highlight definitions and indentation based folding enabled (QTCREATORBUG-12172)
  • Fix of a GDB crash with large object names (QTCREATORBUG-12330)
  • Fixed filtering in help topic chooser

For full list of changes, please check the Creator 3.1.2 change log.

Charts and Data Visualization

Today we have also released the Qt Enterprise Data Visualization 1.1 and Charts 1.4 add-ons. Both of these contain improvements and new features based on customer requests, for example custom 3D objects and labels can now be drawn in graphs, axis labels are now interactive, and logarithmic axis is now supported also for Data Visualization (as has already been with Charts).

Check the Blog post for more details about Qt Enterprise Data Visualization 1.1 and Charts 1.4 add-ons.

Get Qt 5.3.1 

Qt 5.3.1 is now tagged in the Qt Project repository and available via both online and offline installers. If you do not have the Qt 5 online installer or wish to use the offline packages, please Visit Your Qt Account, if you are a Qt Enterprise customer, or download the open-source installers from Qt Project downloads page.

If you would like to try Qt Enterprise, please Download the free Qt Enterprise 30 day trial.


Blog Topics:

Comments