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Qt 4.4 provides many improvements and enhancements over the previous releases in the Qt 4 series. This documents covers the most important features in this release, separated by category.
A comprehensive list of changes between Qt 4.3 and Qt 4.4 is included in the changes-4.4.0 file available online.
A list of other Qt 4 features can be found on the What's New in Qt 4 page.
Highlights
Qt 4.4 includes the QtWebKit module which provides a Qt-style API for the open source WebKit browser engine, making it possible for developers to use a fully-featured Web browser to display documents and access online services. The module also provides a level of integration beyond support for simple Web browsing tasks, enabling other application components to communicate with the browser via Qt's signals and slots inter-object communication mechanism.
A graph-based architecture provides an intuitive, extensible way to configure Phonon for playback. The use of native multimedia backends for each platform enables applications to support platform-specific media formats in addition to those commonly used on multiple platforms.
A synchonous (blocking) API is supplemented with an asynchronous (non-blocking) API which uses the concept of futures to handle synchronization between a main thread and several worker threads, simplifying the delivery of results. With the arrival of the new help formats, the way Qt applications provide online help has also been updated. Qt Assistant has been improved to support automation as a child process of any Qt application, allowing applications to request specific items of documentation, perform searches, and even customize the user interface of Qt Assistant itself.Improved Help System
Qt Assistant has been redesigned to use a self-contained help format for documentation packages that makes it easier to maintain collections of documents. The indexing facilities provided by Qt Assistant have been improved to allow multiple co-existing collections of documents to be searched, and results from advanced searches are presented in a familiar webpage-style result page. Printing System Improvements
Improvements to printing in Qt 4.4 include support for custom page sizes and custom margins, as well as the ability to programatically enumerate printers via the new QPrinterInfo class.
A couple of new classes, QPrintPreviewWidget and QPrintPreviewDialog, have been added to make it easy to add a print preview to an application. The QPrintDialog and QPageSetupDialog classes for X11 have been redesigned to be easier to use.Qt for Windows CE
Qt 4.4 is the first release to include provision for Windows CE as a supported platform. Qt for Windows CE contains all functions necessary to develop end-to-end applications, as well as integrated developer tools, such as powerful graphical user interface (GUI) and forms builder and robust features for translation of applications into new languages. Qt for Embedded Linux
Qt 4.4 contains a number of improvements specifically for the Embedded Linux platform, many of which are related to performance and extending the range of supported display hardware. These include a screen driver DirectFB and a driver that uses the ATI Handheld Interface library.
In addition, a new selection of demonstrations and examples has been included to showcase the graphical features of Qt for Embedded Linux.
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