July 3, 2013 — Digia released Qt 5.1 user interface (UI) development software with support for Android and iOS . Qt simplifies developers’ lives by enabling them to produce applications faster with intuitive user interfaces for multiple targets in the desktop, embedded and mobile space. It also makes it easier to address the paradigm shifts that touchscreen devices require.
Qt 5.1 is fully integrated with the Qt Creator 2.7 IDE, resulting in a smooth development experience from within a single package. The Technology Previews for Qt on Android and iOS enable developers to start developing for the two most popular mobile operating systems while providing an easy way to port applications from other platforms by reusing the same code base. Most of the Qt functionality and tool integration is already in place to start developing mobile applications.
Complete ports to iOS and Android will come with Qt 5.2 later this year. Qt’s ability to deliver impressive graphics is enhanced by the use of OpenGL ES, the version of the graphics application programming interface designed specifically for embedded systems and mobile devices. This makes it easier to develop and deploy rich graphics with velvet-like animations and transitions as well as smoothly-rendered 2D and 3D animations on high-end architectures as well as on devices with relatively limited performance, such as mobile phones, tablets and low-cost development platforms.
Qt supports all major desktop operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, embedded operating systems such as embedded Linux, Windows Embedded as well as the most widely deployed real-time operating systems for embedded devices – VxWorks, Neutrino and INTEGRITY – and popular mobile OSes including Android, iOS (Technology Previews), BlackBerry, and SailFish.
