Qt Toolkit - Key Features in Qt 2.1

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# Key Features in Qt 2.1

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.