14 DAY TRIAL // The Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Qt 5.6.
Qt is a cross-platform and open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit for the GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, and the next major update, Qt 5.6, promises to bring a huge number of fixes and improvements in almost all of the areas. However, the number-one feature for Qt 5.6 is long-term support (LTS), which means that the software will receive updates and patch-level releases during the next three years.
"It is my pleasure to announce that we have released Qt 5.6 Beta today, with binary installers available for convenient installation," said Tuukka Turunen, Director at Qt Project in the official release announcement for Qt 5.6 Beta. "Qt 5.6 will be a long-term supported release as we announced at the Qt World Summit in the beginning of October. This means Qt 5.6 support for 3 years along with additional patch-level releases."
Full Windows 10 support, new CI system
Among other interesting features that will be implemented in the forthcoming Qt 5.6 GUI toolkit, we can mention an all-new CI system called Coin (COntinuos INtegration), which promises to bring more power to the Qt release infrastructure, fully revamped and cross-platform High-DPI (HiDPI) support, full Windows 10 support, including Visual Studio 2015 binaries, and the removal of support for the deprecated Webkit and Qt Quick 1 technologies.
If you're a Qt developer and you want to test-drive this first Beta release, you can download the binary and source packages for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems right now from Softpedia, but please try to keep in mind that it's a pre-release version and some features are incomplete, so don't use it in production environments. The development cycle of Qt 5.6 will continue with the Release Candidate (RC) build and the final release in the coming months.