I was searching the Internet now for the phrase “Greek present”, but I couldn’t find it in English. It appears to be a Portuguese expression only: “presente de grego” means a present you really don’t want. The reference is to one famous present the Greek gave to the Trojans a couple thousand years ago.
The reason this came to my mind today was we’re giving you two early Christmas presents today, both related to the Greek alphabet. And unlike the Ancient Greek, we think you’re going to like these presents 
. The first one, Thorbjørn blogged about earlier today. The second, it’s my honour to present once again: Qt 4.5 Beta is released!
That’s two betas in one day. You’d think that we would have planned this carefully to coincide and to be close to the holidays. I guess that, had we planned that in the first place, we wouldn’t have made it. But it’s all for the better that it worked out fine 
You all know the main features we added for Qt 4.5, so I won’t dwell on them here. But you can see that the addition of a new port (to Mac Cocoa) is our focus for the moment (Watch the Widget Pimp^W^W^WTrenton’s video on Youtube if you can’t see in our webpage)
I’d like to emphasise one point that Thorbjørn didn’t emphasise enough: Qt Creator is now Open Source. We had planned on doing that the whole time, but the need to publish the alpha trumped getting organised. And more than that: Qt Creator’s source code repository is available for everyone to see. Unlike the existing Qt snapshots, this is the real thing and is the same source code that our developers are using. No tricks!
And it couldn’t be any different: Qt Creator beta uses Qt 4.5 beta. So you should download the latest and greatest Qt too.
The Qt 4.5 beta is a great improvement to the technical preview we released almost two months ago. Whereas that was a package just after feature freeze, containing whatever we had at the time, with minimal QA, the beta is about a more polished product. We aren’t release quality yet, but we’re that much closer.
Between the TP and the Beta, we’ve done a lot of bug-fixing, regression testing and general polishing. We’ve updated the documentation and added new examples and demos too (I highly recommend the new Boxes demonstration, even though that’s very CPU and GPU intensive). Like I mentioned in my last blog, we’ve taken a lot of care to fix both glaring and subtle issues that still plagued Qt. I’ve been running KDE 4.2 beta using Qt 4.5 beta for the past weeks, without major issues, and, like I said above, the Qt Creator beta is also using Qt 4.5 beta.
That says a lot. In fact, when we started discussing with other groups inside Nokia what they call “alpha” and “beta”, it became quite apparent that our definitions are one step ahead of theirs. What they call “beta”, we’d call “alpha” or “technical preview” (feature-complete, documented, unit-tested, minimal integration testing and manual QA). For us, “beta” has to pass a series of baseline scenarios, compile in all of our supported platforms, plus it needs a month or two of QA.
That being said, you’ll still probably find issues with Qt 4.5 beta. If you do, please let us know: send email to the qt4-preview-feedback@trolltech.com mailing list (see the announcement for subscription instructions).
Happy holidays everyone and happy hacking!
14 Responses to “A Greek Christmas present”
In English, there is a saying, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which has the same meaning.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
I fear the Greeks, especially when they bear presents.
It comes from the Eneid by Virgil. The words were said by Laocoon, the great priest of Troy, when he saw the wooden horse.
@Charles
and if you prepend “quidquid id est” you get a beautiful hexameter, too.
Vale
Well, you could “dwell on features” a bit more… it never get’s old 
Besides, I don’t remember anyone talking about the script debugger included in 4.5….
Too bad you have removed the remote debugging capability found on the labs 
I guess the Boxes demonstration uses the graphics hardware, because it almost take no CPU on my machine. Very impressive demo indeed, though I don’t need these 3D capabilities
There are so many samples now, that you should have a document: “demo: what’s new”…
@Correa: The Qt Script debugger is in Qt 4.5, it has been in the snapshots since september or so
http://doc.trolltech.com/main-snapshot/qscriptenginedebugger.html
Great! Then maybe we’ll see you all in Jamaica!
Matthias, Charles:
What about a translation to Latin of Qt?
Then maybe Vatican becomes a new Qt customer
A more realistic Greek gift for this Christmas is the rebelion of the youth against the corrupted elder politicians that you might have heard of in the news these past days.
If you want to name the new Qt a Trojan Horse perhaps you should use a name closer to the original “Durios Ipos” (wooden horse). This is how we call it in Greece. Trojan horse is a term used by English people because it is easier to pronounce.
Perhaps an even better idea would be “Qt Horse”
The Trojan Horse is known by that name not because it’s easier to pronounce (wooden horse is perfectly easy to pronounce, and there is a song by that name by Suzanne Vega, not about the Trojan horse), but to distinguish it from any other wooden replica of a horse.
Durios Ipos is the one that is difficult to pronounce. English speaking people cannot pronounce words with clean E vowels. Some would pronounce it as epos, some other as aipos, so in order to pronounce it closer to the original sound one would have to rewrite it to something like Durhios Hipos which is also distorted by the H. Its a mess.. many Greek words are impossible to be pronounced correctly in the English language.
My last comments were off topic.. let me make one more, more focused this time..
I think Qt is a superb technology and Qt Creator a great tool. But I think Qt Creator must make much greater steps forward. I think the Qt Creator developers HAVE to have a look at Delphi and the .NET IDE. There are many simple and functional little tricks you can do to make Qt Creator the absolute dev tool. I know quite a few programmers from big companies here in Greece who would like to switch to linux but they can’t because there are no complete tools yet. So the only solution for them is Java and .NET. Java is not the fastest language in the world, so they are left with .NET. It is a shame.. I hope Qt Creator can change this.
I’m really happy to learn that QtCreator has been released opensource finally !
I’m looking forward to see its bones
I really like the debugger integration !