| Qt 2.1 introduces new features as well as many improvements over the |
| 2.0.x series. This file will only give an overview of the main changes |
| since version 2.0.2. A complete list would simply be too large to be |
| useful. For more detail see the online documentation which is included |
| in this distribution, and also available on |
| http://qt.nokia.com/doc/ |
| |
| The Qt version 2.1 series is binary compatible with the 2.0.x |
| series - applications compiled for 2.0 will continue to run with 2.1. |
| |
| As with previous Qt releases, the API and functionality of Qt is |
| completely portable between Microsoft Windows and X11. It is also portable |
| between Windows 95, 98 and NT; unlike most toolkits, Qt lets a single |
| executable work on all three. |
| |
| **************************************************************************** |
| * Overview * |
| **************************************************************************** |
| |
| As usual, large sections of the documentation have been revised and |
| lots of new documentation has been added. |
| |
| Much work went into existing classes, based on all the feedback we got |
| from our users. A warm thank you to you all at this point, we honestly |
| hope to satisfy most of your wishes with the new release. |
| |
| Among the things that got a lot of polishing is the new geometry |
| management system that was introduced with the 2.x series. Some |
| classes, such as QBoxLayout, have been rewritten and many size hints |
| and size policies were optimized. As usual with newly introduced |
| systems, the occasional bug has been fixed as well. As a result, |
| layout in Qt-2.1 is not only nicer but also faster. |
| |
| Big parts of the file dialog have been rewritten. It is now |
| synchronized in terms of features with the common Windows dialog, |
| including fancy drag'n'drop and in-place renaming. You can customize |
| both parts of the dialog, the front-end with info and preview widgets, |
| the back-end with different network protocols (see the QFileDialog and |
| QNetworkProtocol documentation for details). |
| |
| Especially interesting for dynamic Qt applications is the newly |
| introduced property system. Many interesting things, from scripting up |
| to graphical user interface builders, become easier. The technology |
| requires a new macro Q_PROPERTY and a new revision of Qt's meta object |
| compiler (moc). See the Qt documentation for details. |
| |
| Due to strong customer demand, we added a cross-platform way to easily |
| implement multi-document interfaces (known as 'MDI'). The widget is |
| called QWorkspace and makes this task trivial. |
| |
| On X11, text dropping from Motif drag'n'drop applications has been |
| added, to make your Qt applications inter-operable with those Motif |
| applications that survived Y2K. |
| |
| The rich text system, first introduced in Qt-2.0, has been |
| revised. Apart from great speed improvements, it now supports HTML |
| tables as well as floating images. |
| |
| QMultiLineEdit, the text input field in Qt, got the missing word wrap |
| functionality. It's probably the last big extension we will add to |
| that widget. In Qt 3.0, it will be replaced by a fancier, faster and |
| more powerful QTextEdit widget that also deals with different colors |
| and fonts in a way similar to the existing QTextView. |
| |
| Qt follows the respective GUI style guides even more closely. This |
| includes honoring desktop settings, and keyboard shortcuts such as |
| Ctrl-Z/Y for undo/redo in line edit and multi-line edit |
| controls. Dialog handling for both modal and non-modal dialogs has |
| been improved to follow the platform conventions precisely. |
| |
| With QIconView, we added a powerful new visualization widget similar |
| to QListView and QListBox. It contains optinally labelled pixmap items |
| that the user can select, drag around, rename, delete and more. |
| |
| Compared to the previous release, we have managed to reduce overall |
| memory consumption while improving execution speed and features. |
| |
| Below is a list of the major new features in existing classes as well |
| as short descriptions of all new classes and the changes in some of |
| the extensions shipped with Qt. |
| |
| |
| **************************************************************************** |
| * New major features in existing classes * |
| **************************************************************************** |
| |
| QApplication - new function wakeUpGuiThread() to simplify using threads |
| with Qt. |
| |
| QArray - added sorting and binary search. |
| |
| QColor - custom color support added. qRgb(r,g,b) helper function |
| now sets an opaque alpha value instead of a transparent |
| one. |
| |
| QComboBox - support for text items with icons. |
| |
| QFileDialog - many new features including fancy drag'n'drop |
| and in-place renaming. |
| Methods like setInfoPreviewWidget()and |
| setContentsPreviewWidget() make it easy to customize |
| the dialog extensively. With QUrlOperator and the |
| QNetworkProtocol abstraction, the dialog can operate |
| transparently by various different network protocols, |
| such as HTTP and FTP (see the Network Extension). |
| |
| QFocusEvent - carries a reason() for the event. Possible reasons are |
| Mouse, Tab, ActiveWindow, ShortCut and other. The |
| addition makes line edit controls behave properly. |
| |
| QHeader - added optional visual sort indicator. Revisited API that |
| operates on sections only (solves the 'logical' vs. 'actual' |
| index confusion). A reworked 'table' example shows how |
| to use QHeader in combination with a scrollview to create |
| a simple spreadsheet. |
| |
| QListBox - many signals and functions added for convenience and |
| greater flexibility. |
| |
| QListView - various selections modes similar to QListBox, many |
| new functions and signals added for convenience and |
| greater flexibility. |
| |
| QMainWindow - implemented draggable and hidable toolbars. A menubar |
| can be made draggable by simply putting it in a toolbar. |
| |
| QMetaObject - Parts of the API made public. The meta object allows |
| applications to access information about an object's |
| properties as well as its signals and slots. |
| |
| QMultiLineEdit - added different word wrap modes: WidgetWidth, |
| FixedPixelWidth and FixedColumnWidth. |
| |
| QObject - property access functions property() and setProperty(). |
| |
| QPen - added adjustable cap and join styles. |
| |
| QPopupMenu - added support for tear-off menus, custom items |
| and widget items. |
| A new function setItemParameter() makes it possible |
| to distinguish between several menu items connected to |
| one single slot. |
| |
| QPrinter - Now allows printing to the default printer without doing |
| setup() first. |
| |
| QProgressDialog - auto-reset and auto-close modes. |
| |
| QPushButton - added a menu button mode with setPopup(). |
| |
| QScrollView - support for auto-scrolling on drag move events (drag |
| auto scroll mode). |
| |
| QSignal - optional additional integer parameter for the emitted |
| signal. |
| |
| QSimpleRichText - added adjustSize() function that implements a clever |
| size hint. Vertical break support for printing. inText() |
| hit test. |
| |
| QSpinBox - different button symbols, currently UpDownArrows and |
| PlusMinus. |
| |
| QSplitter - supports three resize modes now, Stretch, KeepSize |
| and FollowSizeHint. |
| |
| QString - new functions setUnicode(), setUnicodeCodes(), setLatin1(), |
| startsWith() and endsWith() |
| |
| QStringList - new functions fromStrList(), split(), join() and grep(). |
| |
| QStyle - some extensions for menu button indicators, default |
| button indicators, variable scrollbar extends and toolbar |
| handles. |
| |
| QStyleSheet - a couple of tags added to the default sheet, such as |
| U, NOBR, HEAD, DL, DT, DD and table support (TABLE, TR, |
| TD, TH). Many attributes added to existing tags. |
| |
| QTextView - basic table support. Contents is selectable, selections |
| can be pasted/dragged into other widgets. |
| |
| QToolBar - stretchable depending on the orientation (setHorizontalStretchable() |
| and setVerticalStretchable(). Added orientationChanged() signal. |
| |
| QToolButton - added optional delayed menu with setPopup() and |
| setPopupDelay(). Auto-raise behaviour adjustable. |
| |
| QWidget - new widget flag WStyle_ContextHelp that adds a |
| context-help button to the window titlebar. The |
| button triggers "What's This?"-help. The flag works |
| with MS-Windows and future versions of X11 desktops |
| such as KDE-2.0. |
| |
| - New function showFullScreen(). |
| |
| - Enabling and disabling with setEnabled() propagates to |
| children. |
| |
| - Changed isVisible(). It now returns whether a widget |
| is mapped up to the toplevel widget (the previous |
| implementation only returned isVisibleTo(parentWidget()). |
| |
| - New property 'backgroundOrigin' that lets a widget draw |
| its background relatively to its parent widget's coordinate |
| system. This makes pseudo-transparency possible, without |
| the overhead of a real widget mask. |
| |
| |
| **************************************************************************** |
| * New clases * |
| **************************************************************************** |
| |
| QCustomMenuItem - an abstract base class for custom menu items in |
| popup menus. |
| |
| QFontDataBase - provides information about the available fonts. Not really |
| a new class (it was used internally for the QFontDialog), |
| but for the first time public API. |
| |
| QGuardedPtr - a template class that provides guarded pointers to |
| QObjects. |
| |
| QIconView - a sophisticated new widget similar to QListView and |
| QListBox. An iconview contains optinally labelled pixmap |
| items that the user can select, drag around, rename, delete |
| and more. The widget is highly optimized for speed and |
| large amounts of icons. |
| |
| QInputDialog - a convenience dialog to get some simple input values from |
| the user. |
| |
| QMetaProperty - stores meta data about properties. Part of the meta |
| object system. |
| |
| QNetworkProtocol- base class for network protocols, provides |
| a common API for network protocols. |
| |
| QUrl/ |
| QUrlOperator - provides an easy way to work with URLs. |
| |
| QVariant - a tagged union for the most common Qt data types. |
| |
| QValueStack - a value-based stack container. |
| |
| QWorkspace - provides a workspace that can contain decorated |
| windows as opposed to frameless child widgets. |
| QWorkspace makes it easy to implement a multi-document |
| interface (MDI). |
| |
| QBig5Codec - provides support for the Big5 Chinese encoding. |
| |
| |
| **************************************************************************** |
| * Changes which may affect runtime behaviour * |
| **************************************************************************** |
| |
| QDataStream / QPicture |
| To accomodate for improved functionality, the stream serialization format |
| of QString and QPen has changed in Qt 2.1. The format version |
| number has been increased to 3. Compatibility has been kept, so |
| applications built with this version of Qt are automatically able to read |
| QDataStream and QPicture data generated by earlier Qt 2.x versions. But if |
| your application needs to generate data that must be readable by |
| applications that are compiled with earlier versions of Qt, you must use |
| QDataStream::setVersion() (if the data contains QString or QPen objects). |
| See the documentation of this function for further discussion. |
| |
| QPainter::drawPolygon() |
| An outline is no longer drawn in the brush color if NoPen is specified. |
| This matches the behaviour on Windows and ensures that the area |
| painted in this case is the same pixels defined by a QRegion made |
| from the polygon. To get the old behaviour, you can call |
| painter.setPen(painter.brush()) prior to painting, which will also |
| work on Windows. |
| |
| QPushButton::sizeHint() |
| The size hint of auto-default push buttons has been slightly |
| increased in order to reserve space for a default button indicator |
| frame. This is necessary for a proper Motif or Platinum emulation. If |
| this change destroys your geometry management, a auto-default button |
| is probably not what you wanted anyway. Simply call |
| setAutoDefault(FALSE) on these push buttons to get the old behaviour. |
| |
| QWidget |
| Font and palette propagation has changed totally (from "almost |
| brain-dead" to working). In practice, the only changes we've seen are |
| to the better. |
| |
| QColor |
| qRgb(r,g,b) now sets a default opaque alpha value of 0xff instead of |
| a transparent 0x00 alpha value formerly. Use qRgb(r,g,b,a) if you do |
| need a transparent alpha value. |
| |
| QPalette |
| It turned out that the old normal/active/disabled set of color groups |
| didn't work very well, except in the simplest hello-world examples, |
| that it couldn't be fixed without nasty hacks, and that during five |
| years nobody had discovered the bugs. So, we've dropped our broken |
| attempt at Tcl/Tk L&F compatibility, and added support for Windows |
| 2000 and Macintosh L&F compatibility instead. The Macintosh and |
| Windows 2000 looks differentiate between the window with focus and |
| other windows. Qt calls the color groups QPalette::active() and |
| QPalette::inactive() respectively. |
| |
| QGridLayout/QBoxLayout |
| setMargin() now also works on child layouts. As a result of this |
| change, the geometry() of a layout now includes margin(). This may |
| effect programs that use QLayout::geometry(). |
| |
| QToolButton |
| The now adjustable auto-raise behaviour defaults to TRUE only when |
| a button is used inside a QToolBar. That's usually what you want. If not, |
| call setAutoRaise(FALSE). |