What's New in Qt 5▲

Qt 5 is the latest version of Qt. It enables developers to develop applications with intuitive user interfaces for multiple targets, faster than ever before. Qt 5 makes it easier to address the latest UI paradigm shifts that touch screens and tablets require.

Developers can be more productive and flexible with the improved support for JavaScript and QML in Qt 5, while still having the C++ foundation and Qt Widget support. HTML5 developers will feel at home with the Web offering that includes Chromium-based Qt WebEngine and Qt WebChannel.

Qt 5 is highly compatible with Qt 4. It is possible for developers of Qt 4 applications to seamlessly move on to Qt 5 with their current functionality and gradually develop new things leveraging all the great items Qt 5 makes possible.

Cross-platform portability is made simpler in Qt 5, thanks to the new modularized codebase consisting of the essential and add-on modules, and the consolidation of the Qt Platform Abstraction.

The following sections summarize some of the key features that Qt 5 brings to the table.

Qt Everywhere on Mobile▲

Qt now comes with production-ready ports for Android, iOS, and WinRT. Extensive work has gone into these platform ports, which now extend Qt’s multi-platform promise to cover desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms.

With full support for Android, iOS, and WinRT, Qt is a great solution for targeting the mobile markets with a single codebase. It is fast and easy to bring existing desktop or embedded application to mobile, by simply recompiling it.

You can install several demo applications that showcase the power of Qt on these mobile platforms. Here is a small list of such applications:

Demo applications:

Platform pages:

  

Amazing Graphics Capability and Performance▲

 

Qt 5 uses an OpenGL-based scene graph to accelerate the graphics of Qt Quick, making it possible to do visually appealing user interfaces with animations, impressive graphical effects and particle systems, even on the constrained hardware environments of mobile and embedded devices.

The benefits of this architectural change in the rendering engine are well demonstrated by the following projects:

  • Livecoding video effects with Qt5 - The Big Buck Bunny you never saw before. Video effects created using Qt Quick.

  • Pimp my video - Video effects implemented using the shader language with QML.

  • QtMediaHub - The power and convenience of Qt Quick.

  • QtonPi - Good example of Qt 5 running on the low cost hardware, Raspberry PI.

Qt Quick in Qt 5▲

Qt Quick provides the necessary infrastructure to develop QML applications. The latest version (v2.0) of this technology also introduces a set of new C++ classes as a replacement for the QDeclarative* equivalents in Qt Quick 1. New features in Qt Quick include:

  • Canvas for drawing. Canvas provides an API that is similar to the HTML5 Canvas API, along with some additional features.

  • Shader Effects which enable GLSL shader programs to be integrated directly into QML code and applied to items and images.