Welcome to the Qt 4 Technology Preview 4.0.0-tp1

Dear Qt user,

We are pleased to present our first Technology Preview release for
what will become Qt 4. We are releasing this code snapshot to our
users because we want to show you some of the new technologies that
will go into the final Qt 4 release, and because we want you to have
the opportunity to give us your feedback. The feedback we receive will
help us to ensure that the final Qt 4 release provides as much value
and productivity as possible.

Please note: Qt 4 still is in a very active state of development. Not
everything is ready for prime time, and there are significant
omissions.

Additionally, this technology preview is only being licensed under a
non-commercial license. It is not meant to be used in production code
or even for application development. Furthermore, please do not attempt
to start porting your Qt 3 based projects over yet. Not all backwards
compatibility functionality is in place yet, and we have not yet
finished the porting guide and the porting tools that will help you
with the process once the Qt 4 final release is imminent.

What you can do is write new small programs to experience what the
next generation of Qt programming with be like. In particular, there
are five new technologies (codenamed: Tulip; Interview; Arthur;
Scribe; and Mainwindow) that we hope you will try out and give us
feedback on. All are new to Qt, written specifically for Qt 4:

 - Tulip, a new set of template container classes.
 - Interview, a model/view architecture for item views.
 - Arthur, the Qt 4 painting framework.
 - Scribe, the Unicode text renderer with a public API for performing
   low-level text layout.
 - Mainwindow, a modern action-based mainwindow, toolbar, menu, and
   docking architecture.

For a more detailed description about the preview and these five areas
please consult tech-preview.html found in doc/html.  See also
getting-started.html for an overview of the main portability issues.

This is a preview of some of the Qt 4 libraries, not of the entire
application development framework. Most notably, new versions of Qt
Designer and Qt Linguist are not included. But we do ship a version of
uic that allows you to experiment with .ui files generated by the Qt 3
Designer. We also ship a ported version of Assistant to make it easier
to read the online documentation provided with this package.

Platforms
---------

The Technology Preview has been tested on a limited set of platforms
only, not the entire range of platforms targeted by the final Qt
product. The Technology Preview supports:

 - GNU/Linux with gcc 2.95 or later (x86)
 - Mac OS X with its native gcc compiler
 - Microsoft Windows 2000 and later, with MSVC 6 or later

Other operating systems and compilers might work but are not yet part
of the testing program.

Feedback
--------

Trolltech has set up a special mailing list, qt4-preview-feedback, for
discussion of Qt Technology Preview-related issues. To subscribe, send
a message containing just the word "subscribe" (without the quotes) to
qt4-preview-feedback-request@trolltech.com. We encourage you to use
this mailing list instead of qt-interest for preview-specific
issues. See http://lists.trolltech.com/ for more information on
Trolltech's mailing lists, including archived discussions.

Roadmap
-------

Depending on the feedback from this Technology Preview, our goal is to
provide a second Preview in Q3 2004, enter the beta phase in Q4 2004
and release the final Qt 4 in late Q1 2005.

Enjoy the Technology Preview: We hope you will have as much fun and
pleasure experimenting with it as we had designing and building it.

--The Trolltech Qt 4 Team
