dist/changes-2.1.0
changeset 0 1918ee327afb
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/dist/changes-2.1.0	Mon Jan 11 14:00:40 2010 +0000
@@ -0,0 +1,314 @@
+Qt 2.1 introduces new features as well as many improvements over the
+2.0.x series. This file will only give an overview of the main changes
+since version 2.0.2.  A complete list would simply be too large to be
+useful.  For more detail see the online documentation which is included
+in this distribution, and also available on
+http://qt.nokia.com/doc/
+
+The Qt version 2.1 series is binary compatible with the 2.0.x
+series - applications compiled for 2.0 will continue to run with 2.1.
+
+As with previous Qt releases, the API and functionality of Qt is
+completely portable between Microsoft Windows and X11.  It is also portable
+between Windows 95, 98 and NT; unlike most toolkits, Qt lets a single
+executable work on all three.
+
+****************************************************************************
+*			    Overview					   *
+****************************************************************************
+
+As usual, large sections of the documentation have been revised and
+lots of new documentation has been added.
+
+Much work went into existing classes, based on all the feedback we got
+from our users. A warm thank you to you all at this point, we honestly
+hope to satisfy most of your wishes with the new release.
+
+Among the things that got a lot of polishing is the new geometry
+management system that was introduced with the 2.x series. Some
+classes, such as QBoxLayout, have been rewritten and many size hints
+and size policies were optimized. As usual with newly introduced
+systems, the occasional bug has been fixed as well. As a result,
+layout in Qt-2.1 is not only nicer but also faster.
+
+Big parts of the file dialog have been rewritten. It is now
+synchronized in terms of features with the common Windows dialog,
+including fancy drag'n'drop and in-place renaming. You can customize
+both parts of the dialog, the front-end with info and preview widgets,
+the back-end with different network protocols (see the QFileDialog and
+QNetworkProtocol documentation for details).
+
+Especially interesting for dynamic Qt applications is the newly
+introduced property system. Many interesting things, from scripting up
+to graphical user interface builders, become easier. The technology
+requires a new macro Q_PROPERTY and a new revision of Qt's meta object
+compiler (moc). See the Qt documentation for details.
+
+Due to strong customer demand, we added a cross-platform way to easily
+implement multi-document interfaces (known as 'MDI'). The widget is
+called QWorkspace and makes this task trivial.
+
+On X11, text dropping from Motif drag'n'drop applications has been
+added, to make your Qt applications inter-operable with those Motif
+applications that survived Y2K.
+
+The rich text system, first introduced in Qt-2.0, has been
+revised. Apart from great speed improvements, it now supports HTML
+tables as well as floating images.
+
+QMultiLineEdit, the text input field in Qt, got the missing word wrap
+functionality. It's probably the last big extension we will add to
+that widget. In Qt 3.0, it will be replaced by a fancier, faster and
+more powerful QTextEdit widget that also deals with different colors
+and fonts in a way similar to the existing QTextView.
+
+Qt follows the respective GUI style guides even more closely. This
+includes honoring desktop settings, and keyboard shortcuts such as
+Ctrl-Z/Y for undo/redo in line edit and multi-line edit
+controls. Dialog handling for both modal and non-modal dialogs has
+been improved to follow the platform conventions precisely.
+
+With QIconView, we added a powerful new visualization widget similar
+to QListView and QListBox. It contains optinally labelled pixmap items
+that the user can select, drag around, rename, delete and more.
+
+Compared to the previous release, we have managed to reduce overall
+memory consumption while improving execution speed and features.
+
+Below is a list of the major new features in existing classes as well
+as short descriptions of all new classes and the changes in some of
+the extensions shipped with Qt.
+
+
+****************************************************************************
+* 		New major features in existing classes			   *
+****************************************************************************
+
+QApplication	- new function wakeUpGuiThread() to simplify using threads
+		  with Qt.
+
+QArray		- added sorting and binary search.
+
+QColor		- custom color support added.  qRgb(r,g,b) helper function
+		  now sets an opaque alpha value instead of a transparent
+		  one.
+
+QComboBox	- support for text items with icons.
+
+QFileDialog	- many new features including fancy drag'n'drop
+		  and in-place renaming.
+		  Methods like setInfoPreviewWidget()and
+		  setContentsPreviewWidget() make it easy to customize
+		  the dialog extensively. With QUrlOperator and the
+		  QNetworkProtocol abstraction, the dialog can operate
+		  transparently by various different network protocols,
+		  such as HTTP and FTP (see the Network Extension).
+
+QFocusEvent	- carries a reason() for the event. Possible reasons are
+		  Mouse, Tab, ActiveWindow, ShortCut and other. The
+		  addition makes line edit controls behave properly.
+
+QHeader		- added optional visual sort indicator. Revisited API that 
+		  operates on sections only (solves the 'logical' vs. 'actual' 
+		  index confusion). A reworked 'table' example shows how
+		  to use QHeader in combination with a scrollview to create
+		  a simple spreadsheet.
+
+QListBox	- many signals and functions added for convenience and
+		  greater flexibility.
+
+QListView	- various selections modes similar to QListBox, many
+		  new functions and signals added for convenience and
+		  greater flexibility.
+
+QMainWindow	- implemented draggable and hidable toolbars. A menubar
+		  can be made draggable by simply putting it in a toolbar.
+
+QMetaObject	- Parts of the API made public. The meta object allows
+		  applications to access information about an object's
+		  properties as well as its signals and slots.
+
+QMultiLineEdit	- added different word wrap modes: WidgetWidth,
+		  FixedPixelWidth and FixedColumnWidth.
+
+QObject		- property access functions property() and setProperty().
+
+QPen		- added adjustable cap and join styles.
+
+QPopupMenu	- added support for tear-off menus, custom items
+		  and widget items.
+		  A new function setItemParameter() makes it possible
+		  to distinguish between several menu items connected to
+		  one single slot.
+
+QPrinter        - Now allows printing to the default printer without doing
+                  setup() first.
+
+QProgressDialog	- auto-reset and auto-close modes.
+
+QPushButton	- added a menu button mode with setPopup().
+
+QScrollView	- support for auto-scrolling on drag move events (drag
+		  auto scroll mode).
+
+QSignal		- optional additional integer parameter for the emitted
+		  signal.
+
+QSimpleRichText - added adjustSize() function that implements a clever
+		  size hint. Vertical break support for printing. inText()
+		  hit test.
+
+QSpinBox	- different button symbols, currently UpDownArrows and
+		  PlusMinus.
+
+QSplitter	- supports three resize modes now, Stretch, KeepSize
+		  and FollowSizeHint.
+
+QString		- new functions setUnicode(), setUnicodeCodes(), setLatin1(),
+		  startsWith() and endsWith()
+
+QStringList	- new functions fromStrList(), split(), join() and grep().
+
+QStyle		- some extensions for menu button indicators, default
+		  button indicators, variable scrollbar extends and toolbar
+		  handles.
+
+QStyleSheet	- a couple of tags added to the default sheet, such as
+		  U, NOBR, HEAD, DL, DT, DD and table support (TABLE, TR,
+		  TD, TH). Many attributes added to existing tags.
+
+QTextView	- basic table support. Contents is selectable, selections
+		  can be pasted/dragged into other widgets.
+
+QToolBar	- stretchable depending on the orientation (setHorizontalStretchable()
+		  and setVerticalStretchable(). Added orientationChanged() signal.
+
+QToolButton	- added optional delayed menu with setPopup() and
+		  setPopupDelay(). Auto-raise behaviour adjustable.
+
+QWidget		- new widget flag WStyle_ContextHelp that adds a
+		  context-help button to the window titlebar. The
+		  button triggers "What's This?"-help. The flag works
+		  with MS-Windows and future versions of X11 desktops
+		  such as KDE-2.0.
+
+		- New function showFullScreen().
+
+		- Enabling and disabling with setEnabled() propagates to
+		  children.
+
+		- Changed isVisible(). It now returns whether a widget
+		  is mapped up to the toplevel widget (the previous
+		  implementation only returned isVisibleTo(parentWidget()).
+
+		- New property 'backgroundOrigin' that lets a widget draw 
+		  its background relatively to its parent widget's coordinate
+		  system. This makes pseudo-transparency possible, without
+		  the overhead of a real widget mask.
+
+
+****************************************************************************
+*				New clases				   *
+****************************************************************************
+
+QCustomMenuItem	- an abstract base class for custom menu items in
+		  popup menus.
+
+QFontDataBase	- provides information about the available fonts. Not really
+		  a new class (it was used internally for the QFontDialog),
+		  but for the first time public API.
+
+QGuardedPtr	- a template class that provides guarded pointers to
+		  QObjects.
+
+QIconView	- a sophisticated new widget similar to QListView and
+		  QListBox.  An iconview contains optinally labelled pixmap
+		  items that the user can select, drag around, rename, delete
+		  and more. The widget is highly optimized for speed and
+		  large amounts of icons.
+
+QInputDialog	- a convenience dialog to get some simple input values from
+		  the user.
+
+QMetaProperty	- stores meta data about properties. Part of the meta
+		  object system.
+
+QNetworkProtocol- base class for network protocols, provides
+		  a common API for network protocols.
+
+QUrl/
+QUrlOperator	- provides an easy way to work with URLs.
+
+QVariant	- a tagged union for the most common Qt data types.
+
+QValueStack	- a value-based stack container.
+
+QWorkspace	- provides a workspace that can contain decorated
+		  windows as opposed to frameless child widgets.
+		  QWorkspace makes it easy to implement a multi-document
+		  interface (MDI).
+
+QBig5Codec	- provides support for the Big5 Chinese encoding.
+
+
+****************************************************************************
+*		Changes which may affect runtime behaviour		   *
+****************************************************************************
+
+QDataStream / QPicture
+ To accomodate for improved functionality, the stream serialization format
+ of QString and QPen has changed in Qt 2.1. The format version
+ number has been increased to 3. Compatibility has been kept, so
+ applications built with this version of Qt are automatically able to read
+ QDataStream and QPicture data generated by earlier Qt 2.x versions. But if
+ your application needs to generate data that must be readable by
+ applications that are compiled with earlier versions of Qt, you must use
+ QDataStream::setVersion() (if the data contains QString or QPen objects).
+ See the documentation of this function for further discussion.
+
+QPainter::drawPolygon()
+ An outline is no longer drawn in the brush color if NoPen is specified.
+ This matches the behaviour on Windows and ensures that the area
+ painted in this case is the same pixels defined by a QRegion made
+ from the polygon.  To get the old behaviour, you can call
+ painter.setPen(painter.brush()) prior to painting, which will also
+ work on Windows.
+
+QPushButton::sizeHint()
+ The size hint of auto-default push buttons has been slightly
+ increased in order to reserve space for a default button indicator
+ frame. This is necessary for a proper Motif or Platinum emulation. If
+ this change destroys your geometry management, a auto-default button
+ is probably not what you wanted anyway. Simply call
+ setAutoDefault(FALSE) on these push buttons to get the old behaviour.
+
+QWidget
+ Font and palette propagation has changed totally (from "almost
+ brain-dead" to working).  In practice, the only changes we've seen are
+ to the better.
+
+QColor
+ qRgb(r,g,b) now sets a default opaque alpha value of 0xff instead of
+ a transparent 0x00 alpha value formerly.  Use qRgb(r,g,b,a) if you do
+ need a transparent alpha value.
+
+QPalette
+ It turned out that the old normal/active/disabled set of color groups
+ didn't work very well, except in the simplest hello-world examples,
+ that it couldn't be fixed without nasty hacks, and that during five
+ years nobody had discovered the bugs.  So, we've dropped our broken
+ attempt at Tcl/Tk L&F compatibility, and added support for Windows
+ 2000 and Macintosh L&F compatibility instead.  The Macintosh and
+ Windows 2000 looks differentiate between the window with focus and
+ other windows.  Qt calls the color groups QPalette::active() and
+ QPalette::inactive() respectively.
+
+QGridLayout/QBoxLayout 
+ setMargin() now also works on child layouts. As a result of this
+ change, the geometry() of a layout now includes margin(). This may
+ effect programs that use QLayout::geometry().
+
+QToolButton
+ The now adjustable auto-raise behaviour defaults to TRUE only when
+ a button is used inside a QToolBar. That's usually what you want. If not,
+ call setAutoRaise(FALSE).