Qt 5.7 Beta Is In Sight

Qt 5.7 continues moving along and due to the concurrent release work with the much-delayed Qt 5.6 that finally shipped in March, the Qt 5.7 beta is already imminent.

The Qt Company today uploaded Qt 5.7 beta packages for Windows, Linux, Mac, and then the source packages. These Qt 5.7.0 beta packages will be promoted to being the official beta in a few days time if no serious bugs are discovered by early testers.

Qt 5.7 has also been running behind schedule with their original planning as the beta originally was supposed to happen in early March and for Qt 5.7 final to ship by the end of April. The latest release plan is putting the final release now at 26 May.

Qt 5.7 enables the use of C++11 in Qt modules, OpenGL improvements, Qt WebEngine is now based on Chromium 49 and supports features like drag-n-drop / spellchecking / print to PDF / HTML5 DRM protected video, Qt QML supports JIT'ing on more platforms, Qt Multimedia now supports Apple tvOS, Qt Bluetooth Low Energy peripheral role is in tech preview form, Qt 3D now supports compute shaders, Qt 3D better supports compressed texture formats, and various other enhancements.

The Qt Wayland Compositor for Qt 5.7 is still in tech preview form and has an improved C++ API and other improvements. There are also new modules in the GPLv3 version of Qt that were previously commercial-only. Those modules include Qt Charts, Qt Data Visualization, Qt Virtual Keyboard, Qt Purchasing, and Qt Quick 2D Renderer. More details on the many changes of Qt 5.7 can be found via this Qt.io Wiki page.