14 DAY TRIAL // On May 15, Digia, through Lars Knoll, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming Qt 5.5 GUI toolkit.
Qt 5.5 Beta is here to offer you a preview of what's coming next in the powerful, open-source, and cross-platform development framework for application, UI & device creation. Also, a part of the effort was put into squashing some of the most annoying bugs reported by users since the release of Qt 5.4.
"Since we released Qt 5.4, a lot of effort has been put into fixing bugs reported both by our customers and the community," says Lars Knoll in the blog announcement. "With this in focus, we went through a couple weeks of dedicated bug fixing here at The Qt Company. During this time, we worked 100% on fixing as many open issues as possible."
In Qt 5.5 Beta, the developers added two new OpenGL modules that significantly extend their already robust set of 3D APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), Qt 3D and Qt Canvas 3D. While the former module lets developers easily integrate and use 3D content into Qt apps, the latter makes using 3D easier in Qt.
Moreover, the QML engine components of the Qt Quick free software application framework were improved with support for JavaScript typed arrays and a new method that lets Qt devs interact with their value-based classes. A TreeView control was added as well into the Qt Quick Controls.
Qt 5.5 Beta brings performance and stability improvements
Among other interesting features that were implemented in Qt 5.5 Beta, we can mention integration of the GStreamer 1.0 multimedia framework on Linux, as the default backend, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform is now supported, Qt WebEngine is based on Chromium 40, and new APIs were added to the Qt WebView module, which now supports the Mac OS X platform.
Last but not least, the Qt Location module allows developers to implement geocoding, mapping, places, and routing in Qt apps, new platforms for Bluetooth LE are supported, and an all-new SSL backend based on Secure Transport was added for the iOS and Mac OS X operating systems. Download Qt 5.5 Beta for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows right now from Softpedia.