Silvan Scherrer and Dmitry A. Kuminov have released the third beta of the port of the Qt 4 application framework to OS/2 and eComStation, i.e., version 4.5.1 beta 3. The new release comes with Qt Linguist, a tool for easy translation of Qt applications to other languages, and considerable improvements in the areas of font support and process handling. With this, Qt 4 for OS/2 and eComStation is near to completion.  

Beta 3 includes the following changes in detail:  

Improvements:

* Qt Linguist tool now included.
*  Added proper font support. All outline (scalable) fonts visible in the Font Palette should be now recognized by Qt. The fonts are hinted and antialiased using the Freetype2 library when drawing text.
*  System fonts and colors are now used by default for Qt widgets.
*  configure.cmd now generates the main Makefile to simplify building of Qt.
*  corelib: QProcess: Implemented child termination detection.
*  corelib: QProcess: Implemented redirection to another QProcess.
*  corelib: QProcess now uses native pipes for stream redirection. This fixes various issues like 'Socket operation on non-socket' errors during parent-child communication.
*  corelib: QProcess: Make sure that the directory containing the executable file is always searched (first) for DLLs needed by this executable. This makes it unnecessary to change the current directory to the executable's directory or add it to LIBPATH before starting the Qt application.
*  corelib: QProcess can now start applications of different type (e.g. PM applications from text-mode applications) directly. QProcess::startDetached() also works.
*  qmake: In debug_and_release mode, 'release-(all|clean|distclean|install| uninstall)' and 'debug-(all|clean|distclean|install|uninstall)' make targets are now available.


Fixes:

*  Doing 'make clean' could result into a hang due to CMD.EXE command line length limitation.
*  corelib: Fixed: QProcess: Lost data during stream redirection.
*  corelib: QSettings could sometimes distort data when saving it to the registry (by replacing some characters with codes 0x80 and above with '?').


The third beta is available for download at:  

http://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/qt4/qt-all-opensource-src-4_5_1-os2-beta3.zip

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework, which is widely used as a widget toolkit for developing GUI programs. Availability for OS/2 and eComStation both means that developers can easily port existing Qt applications and create new ones more easily.  

This already has been the case with Qt 3. Now that Qt 4 is widely used, the netlabs.org Qt 4 project aims to make the latest version 4.5 available for OS/2 and eComStation. It currently is in beta stage and applications start to become available.  

For more information, see:  

http://qt.netlabs.org/en/site/index.xml

Since the project relies on funds made by the OS/2 and eComStation community, please consider making a donation:  

http://www.mensys.com/NetlabsQT4