When I started more than two years ago at the Berlin office (then called Trolltech GmbH), Creator was a Creative Friday project called Workbench. Later it got renamed to Project Greenhouse; shortly before the first release we settled for the name Creator. Though I did think that Greenhouse had a nice touch, Creator fits perfectly, since it puts you, the Creator of great things in the center. Our philosophy is to not solely focus on a big feature list, but also on small details which make your life easier.
But everyone wants to hear about new features, so here we go:
Our biggest new feature for 1.2 is surely the cdb integration, that is you can now debug applications built with the Microsoft Visual Studio compiler. Also, our debugger dumpers display Qt types in a much nicer way than Visual Studio. See the recent blog post: Peek and Poke.
In the code editor we've refined the matching parentheses highlighting and added better code folding visuals and block highlighting. The block highlighting feature illustrates the size of each block using different shades of gray for the background. For me, it's unobtrusive highlighting of scopes is a nice touch. However, this feature is optional and can be turned off.
Another cool new feature is the automatic updating of the code model when the .ui file changes. In other words, you can drop a widget on the form and immediately enjoy code completion even without saving. Finally, when you start Creator 1.2, you'll be greeted by our new welcome screen.
To mention a few of the small features we implemented to make your life easier:
- Search and replace with regular expressions
- Better faking of vim
- Auto Save before Build, Run without Building Options
- Ability to disable breakpoints
- Better auto detection of installed VS compilers
- Tons of stuff
Edit: You can download the Creator 1.2 release and the 2009.3 SDK, which consists of a prebuild Qt and Creator 1.2 from here.
