• Qt Quarterly 16 released to public

    Today the 16th issue (Q4 2005) of Qt Quarterly has been published on Troltech site.
    The magazine covers mostly features that were introduced in Qt 4.1. Five articles were made available.

    Transparent Backgrounds in Qt 4.1

    This article explains changes between Qt3 and Qt4.0 and between Qt4.0 and Qt4.1 that were made to Qt painting mechanisms. It gives information how to trigger different background effects, ranging from usual solid opaque background to transparent widgets with their parent's background shining through and non-rectangular widgets.
    It also introduces the new "Backing Store", which allows fast and cross-platform painting effects, like composition, exposure and other on the raster engine.

    Extending Qt Designer

    As Qt4.1 gave people the ability to extend and operate on Qt Designer components, this article explains what and how can be done to write full featured widget plugins that can use Designer components in their own way.
    Most of the topics are covered in Qt reference, but having all that info in one place instead of scattered throughout the docs does make a difference.

    Third-Party Automated Testing Tools

    Third article describes two third party testing frameworks for Qt. Apart from the module built into Qt 4.1 users can use KD Executor by KDAB and Squish by froglogic to test their GUIs.

    Dynamic Signals and Slots

    Next article reveals the truth beneath signals and slots and shows how to implement a class which allows dynamic (runtime) signal and slot creation, without using moc. DynamicQObject shows how to emit signals and invoke slots.
    The article also mentions pitfalls and hints for people who would like to extend that functionality.

    Fading Effects with Qt 4.1

    Last article shows how to create a fading effect for widgets using semi-transparency present in Qt.
    A special widget is designed, which is then applied to the proper widget. That helper widget changes using a timer from being completely opaque to full transparency and then detatches itself from the parent.
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