[dot] Qt 4.5 to Dramatically Improve QtWebKit and QGraphicsView Through Animations and Speed Ups

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1218387228/

From: Sebastian Kuegler <sebas at kde.org>
Dept: graphics-overlords
Date: Sunday 10/Aug/2008, @09:53

Qt 4.5 to Dramatically Improve QtWebKit and QGraphicsView Through Animations and Speed Ups
==========================================================================================

   At Akademy in Belgium, Qt developers Simon Hausmann and Andreas
Aardal Hanssen announced dramatic improvements in the web browser engine
in Qt and the canvas that is used by for example the Plasma desktop
shell. Video support, animations and transitions, optimisations to speed
up painting and animations, new graphical effects open up nearly endless
new possibilities for developers to present their user interfaces with.
    Reflecting a video in QtWebKit
     Hausmann demonstrated a WebKit based Konqueror web browser
displaying video content through the HTML 5 video tag. With only one
line of HTML code, video content in Ogg format can be embedded in
webpages. Style elements can then display reflections of this video
widget. Naturally, the underlying multimedia engine used in QtWebKit for
showing video content is KDE's Phonon multimedia layer. Animations will
also be possible. By adding simple CSS properties to your webpage
elements, you can animate, rotate and fade those elements. Writing rich
and animated webpages and of course embedded web content in applications
becomes a breeze with QtWebkit.

     After Simon's demo of QtWebkit, Andreas Aardal Hanssen entered the
stage to show some of the improvements that will be in Qt 4.5 which will
be released later this year or in early 2009. After Qt 4.4 brought the
goodness of widgets-on-canvas and lots of optimisations that especially
speed up Plasma.  More breakthroughs in the development of Qt's graphics
canvas are coming up. Speed-ups of up to 40 times
[http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/08/06/in-the-flow/] faster in some
cases go along with a set of really nice additions that are unparalleled
in today's toolkits and can only be dreamt of in competing offerings.
Improvements that will be available in Qt 4.5 include:

    * Extensive support for animations through a new animation API
    * Graphical effects like blur, bloom, shadow and opacity for items
      on the GraphicsView
    * Transition animations in user interfaces
    * Optimisations in painting operations

     Hausmann's and Hanssen's future plans for those components in Qt
have been met enthusiastically by the KDE developers. Soon, these new
features and optimisations will be available to KDE users around the
Free world.