Releases Galore!

It would be negligent of me if I did not point out that today several important software releases were made:

The first is the project formerly known as project greenhouse - now known as Qt Creator. I've blogged about this before. You can now download a technical preview. I'm very excited about this - having played with it in it's beta state I can't wait to use it with some of my active projects. Unfortunately I won't be doing any coding this weekend, as I'm off to Switzerland for a long weekend. I'll have to try it out when I get back.

The second big release event today is the Ubuntu family of distributions. That's right, version 8.10 is out now. I'm a kubuntu man myself, so I'll be trying this out after my long weekend as well.

That's all from me - I have several projects in the wings to blog about in the coming weeks, but for now I need to catch some sleep - my taxi arrives at 5:00 AM tomorrow.

Cheers,

It's true: Qt Developer Days Rock!

Well, I'm back. I arrived home at 1:30 AM this morning. Qt Software's "Developer Days" conference was simply brilliant. On top of the many technical talks (I'll digest them and use them as inspiration for new posts here over the next few weeks), it was a great chance to meet other Qt developers, and the trolls themselves.

There's a lot of stuff to talk about - more than I can do justice in one post. I will quickly mention Project Greenhouse, the new IDE that should be released as alpha software in the next few weeks. Details are sketchy, but the following points are probably all correct:

• "Project Greenhouse" is the development title - it may chance before release.
• The IDE is aimed at creating a truly cross-platform development environment.
• Uses GCC / GDB to compile / debug code.
• Includes nice editor features like code folding, syntax highlighting, auto-completion etc.
• It's been touted as a "replacement for Vi/Emacs" - although this is misleading - as I understand it no one is going to create a Vi clone editor in the IDE. It's a replacement in the sense that you will no longer need to use Vi in order to edit your code under Linux.
  

One point the trolls were very insistent upon was that they're not trying to replace Visual Studio, Eclipse, KDevelop, or XCode. Those IDEs have a great many features, whereas PG intends to deliver a core set of features - just enough to make Qt development a breeze across multiple platforms.

At least, that's my interpretation of the project. There's been lots of speculation across the internet and on the Qt-interest mailing list about the project, so we may have to wait and see.