Digia announces enhanced BB10 support for Qt

Digia, the company that acquired Qt from Nokia has announced enhanced support the Blackberry's new Blackberry 10 operating system.

Qt is a framework that works across many platforms (both desktop and mobile) and allows developers to use the same front-end code which will work across all the supported platforms and Qt is used in Blackberry's Cascade framework which is used to develop native Blackberry applications.

Digia maintains the commercial version of Qt and also the open source version that is available from the Qt Project which is where any Blackberry enhancements are upstreamed to.

Digia releases Qt 5.0

Digia the company that has taken over the development of Qt (from Nokia) has released version 5.0 of the toolkit. This maintains compatibility with Qt 4.

Qt 5 benefits include:

• graphics quality
• performance on constrained hardware
• cross-platform portability
• support for C++11
• HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2
• a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs

Qt 5 also supports OpenGL ES (the version of Open GL that is optimised for embedded systems).

Qt supports a wide range of 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.

Digia is maintaining 2 versions of Qt, the commercial version and a 30 day free trial is available from qt.digia.com and the open source version from qt-project.org.

Nokia dumps Qt

Nokia has sold the Qt business to Digia including 125 staff mainly from Oslo and Berlin. Digia had already purchased the Qt licensing business from Nokia in March 2011.

Qt is a cross platform set of libraries allowing developers to use the same front-end code for MacOS X, Windows and Linux (as well as other embedded system like Symbian, INFINITY, VxWORKS and QNX). Qt was originally developed by Trolltech which Nokia bought in 2008.

Nokia has lost its way in recent years having dropped its lead in the mobile phone markets (though it still has a large base in 3rd world countries) as is now concentrating on a smartphone market using Microsoft Windows Phone.

Digia is hoping to further develop Qt which has been used by over 450,000 developers and Digia is hoping to rapidly support MS Windows 8, Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

The commercial version of Qt will be maintained at Digia and the open-source variant at Qt-Project.