The two days event run by Trolltech in the Hilton Park Hotel in Munich was fully loaded with
Add two nice giveaways (a Trolltech branded backpack which is really usefully designed + a Trolltech shirt) and a lot of friendly Trolls and you have an event that was really worth to attend.
For me, the most impressing issues were:
1. Matthias Ettrich announced that Trolltech is working on Qt for Windows CE and that it's supposed to be out in 2008. This is an important step that may have serious impact to Embedded Linux. Basically, it means we have roughly one more year left to shape our platforms. By 2008, Windows CE will be a much stronger competitor than it ever was.
2. Thanks to the new Interview framework -- which is slightly based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern -- a lot of new possibilities for presenting and manipulating data in QListViews arise. You are using classes derived from QAbstractItemModel to interface with your data model and you are using classes derived from QItemDelegate to do custom painting per item or derived from QAbstractItemView to control the layout or even the complete viewport. The possibilities are endless and starting by now you can (finally) resuse data models and data views seperatly -- which is a great thing.
3. Qt 4.2 contains a revamped version of Multithreading support. The most useful fact is that there are per-thread event loops now. This makes signalling between threads much more easy, e.g. signals are thread-safe nowadays, because slots are no longer called from the context of the emitting thread. This is one great feature that users probably won't recognize, but it allows for reduced latency and more simple (hence less error-prone) algorithms.
4. Customizing the Qt look previously needed deriving a custom class from QStyle which implements drawing the widgets. In Qt 4.2 Trolltech seperated the widget look description from actual code by using a description language similar to CSS which is parsed on-the-fly when widgets are drawn. This enables designers styling your application, not coders. It blows away Gtk+ RC files. Interestingly, it's quite similar to what Enlightenment's Edje can do -- I guess both used CSS as inspiration.
5. The canvas is back! And it will blow you away. Visualizing complex data has never been so easy and powerful. I can't wait to write the first application using QGraphicsView.
The ones of you who know me from the Opie project are probably wondering why I didn't say anything about the GreenPhone yet. Uhm, well, ... I don't feel very excited about that. It's good to have an "open" (it's still not clear whether the libraries will be open source) Qtopia platform, but it comes two years late, the "SDK" is a joke (they really should hire someone with OpenEmbedded experience) and I'm afraid the community has moved on to X11 (that is: kdrive) and Gtk+.
I'm looking forward to be on board for the DevDays'06 and want to express my gratitude to Trolltech which made it possible for me (and a lot of other open source developers) to attend this conference - thanks!