Today Qt Software released Qt 4.5.0 and Qt Creator 1.0.0, the culmination of almost a year’s development effort since Qt 4.4.0 was released last May. For the impatient among you, the new release can be downloaded here.
The 4.5.0 release contains a myriad of new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Many of these are a result of the feedback we have received from you, the community of Qt users. Your continued support and feedback is a big part of what makes Qt such a great product.
In the coming weeks, we’ll track the known issues for this release here. If you find something that isn’t already on this list, please report it to us so that we can make Qt even better next time around.
I won’t go into the new features in detail - that has been done by others already. Instead I’ll show you some of the people who made Qt 4.5.0 and Qt Creator 1.0.0 happen, Qt Software’s hard-working Oslo, Berlin and Brisbane development teams.
I’m sure that by now many of you have noticed that the name at the top of this blog is not the one that you are accustomed to seeing on announcements of Qt releases, so I guess I’d better introduce myself.
Four years ago I joined Trolltech’s Brisbane office as a QA Engineer and Release Manager for Qtopia (now Qt Extended). Since then, I’ve been working to improve the quality of Qtopia and to increase the level of automation in the testing and release processes.
The opportunity to become Qt’s Release Manager arose when it was decided that Thiago Macieira would move to other duties in the Qt Software team. Thiago has done a fantastic job of co-ordinating releases during the Qt 4.3 and Qt 4.4 series and in the lead-up to Qt 4.5.0. Those are some big shoes to fill.
Six weeks ago I boarded a Qantas flight in Brisbane, bound for Oslo. My mission was to:
* learn everything I could about how Qt releases are made,
* make sure 4.5.0 made it out on time, and
* develop a plan for how Qt releases will be done in the future.
With today’s release of Qt 4.5.0, you can see that the first two goals have been achieved.
The results of the third item will start to become visible over the coming months. Already, it is clear that the recent addition of the LGPL to Qt’s licensing model will enable us to make some significant improvements and simplifications in how we package and deliver Qt.
Sadly, my time in Oslo is almost over. Although I have experienced many differences between Brisbane and Oslo (not least being the difference between 42 degrees and -14 degrees), the things that the Oslo, Berlin, Brisbane and other Qt Software offices have in common have given me a lot of confidence in the future of Qt, No matter where they are in the world, Qt Software developers have the same spirit of innovation and the same dedication to giving application developers a powerful, flexible and easy to use framework.
In a few days I will leave the chilly Norwegian winter and head back home to Brisbane, where I will begin work on the next Qt release. For the first time, much of the co-ordination of a Qt release will happen in Brisbane, though the location from which the release machinery is operated is not very important. As always, the product will be driven forward by the highly-skilled Qt Software developers in Oslo, Brisbane, Berlin and a variety of other places.
We hope you will find Qt 4.5.0 and Qt Creator 1.0.0 useful and we hope you enjoy using them as much as we enjoyed creating them.
29 Responses to “Qt 4.5 hits the (virtual) shelves”
What can I say… Congratulations!
But… I submitted a bug in uic yesterday. I’m sure it wasn’t fixed in this release. 
I’m looking forward for possibility to contribute patches more easily.
Keep rockin’!
It’s great news 4.5 is here! But now I can’t find any Jambi downloads and rebuild my application with this new version, fixing some QPlainTextEdit bugs.
As with previous releases, Jambi will be released a few weeks after Qt 4.5.0. Keep an eye on labs for the release announcement.
I was a purely GTK+C guy, tried qtcreator in early beta and loved it, since then I’ve written two projects in Qt, and from here on out it will definitely be my toolkit of choice.
Excellent job!
Any plans for torrents? The downloads are not small and really slow atm.
Congratulations! It’s a great release!
Great work! It is certainly exciting news to see how far Qt has come, but also sad that Jambi is being discontinued, especially since I just started heavily using it. Does anyone know if there is enough support for it to see it continue as a community project? The thought of devolving to Swing makes me depressed…
@elloyd: “sad that Jambi is being discontinued”
I don’t think anyone said that Jambi was being discontinued. As Jason McDonald already said, expect the release a few weeks after Qt.
@Michael “Q” Howell: “I don’t think anyone said that Jambi was being discontinued.”
http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news/preview-of-final-qt-jambi-release-available
torrents would be highly appreciated.
Congratulation for the release
Uh… I think Jason forgot one item in his to-do list of when he came to Oslo: skeptical as he is, he wasn’t taking our word in face value about Norwegian beer. So in the past 6 weeks, besides learning everything that is to know, Jason and the Oslo team had a chance to mingle and know each other much better. And after those 6 weeks, I am 100% sure that Qt releases are in good hands.
Here’s to the first of many from Jason!
Congratulations, I appreciate the LGPL introduction.
Torrents would be great, downloading with 17kb/s… :/
Qt 4.5, SDK and Creator can also be downloaded as Torrents; http://dist.trolltech.com/torrents/
Congratulations!! Can’t wait to try it …. at the moment it is “undownloadable”
There is a tracker error (details are unknown to me) with torrent http://dist.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-sdk-win-opensource-2009.01.exe.torrent
Used uTorrent as client.
Otherwise, congratulations !
1. Congrats. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this for some time! It looks like a quality release!
2. What is being included in 4.6? So far I only know of Kinetic.
I would love to have proper XML XPath support. Unfortunately, Qt only supports read-only. I’d like to be able to use XPath to select nodes from a document and edit them using QDomNode.
Congratulations! Great job…
(rsync download worked btw)
Congratulations! Can’t wait to try the new SDK!
I noticed that the ActiveQt sources are included in the LGPL SDK package. I’m not entirely sure, but I AFAIK previous Qt versions didn’t include them in the opensource editions. Is ActiveQt now LGPL’ed, too? It seems this is not the case, since the build script still checks for a vaild commercial license.
Conspiracy? maemo alpha was released today as well! http://maemo.org/news/announcements/maemo_5_alpha_sdk_released/
@A.Konrad: I hear all solutions are now LGPL too. So I would think yes.
ActiveQt is now part of the open source package too. We didn’t fix the build scripts, but it’s there. Note, however, that mingw cannot compile it: you need Visual Studio for ActiveQt.
As for the license, it’s one of those cases where the LGPL wouldn’t work quite well, so we went for another: see for example qaxmain.cpp
About http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news/qt-software-discontinues-qt-extended/
The Oslo team will work only on Qt now ?
Will be resignations on the team ?
NICE, GO QT !!!
@WaxDragon: No resignations, just more Qt’ers now 
Whoa, that must be eastern Berlin. That picture needs a serious dose of hue, the norsk lads look like they are roasting on a veritable chromatic spit by comparrison with the several “einer Berliners”.
xxx
Brussel sprouts for Berlin.
@Qurly: But of course it’s eastern Berlin, thats where all the cool kids live!
Thank you Nokia! But can you make clear your story about Visual Studio? You offer a beta Visual Studio Integration and say, “We want to enable everyone who downloads Qt from our website to have the option of using Qt together with Visual Studio, regardless of whether they choose to use a commercial evaluation version, the GPL or the LGPL.” But you do not offer a SDK containing Visual Studio compatible libraries, only mingw compatible ones. Are you going to offer a Visual Studio compatible Qt SDK for Windows for download?
One more question, if I may. Are you going to LPGL the previously commercial-only classes like QtSoap? I would hate to pay commercial license fees (very expensive) to use a handful of classes, useful though they may be. Thank you! P.S. I had to try several times to submit these comments because the capcha was too difficult to read.
Hmm it seems that the Qt Solutions still requires commerical license :(. I hope they get added offically into Qt-4.5.1 or 4.6.0