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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://doc.trolltech.com/
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).
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