The Qt Company has pushed out Qt 6.1, the first minor release in the Qt 6 series of the cross-platform framework for GUI applications that debuted at the end of 2020.
The main focus of the update, according to Qt, is to bring many of the add-on modules that had been supported in the earlier Qt 5.15 release over to the Qt 6 series. There are eight of these in total, including the Active Qt module to support COM and ActiveX controls on Windows, Qt Charts for adding charts to applications, and Qt Lottie for rendering graphics and animations created in Adobe After Effects.
The updated modules bring back some of the features and capabilities from Qt 5.15 that many developers rely upon. However, there are still a couple of modules in need of updating and these are expected to appear with the Qt 6.2 release. More details are available in the Qt roadmap for 2021.
Beyond the latest modules, Qt 6.1 has attempted to simplify the Qt Core APIs and offer developers greater convenience. As an example, Qt has added removeIf() methods and extended the support of erase_if() to more classes. Also added are some previously missing methods in QStringView to make it better mirror the QString API.
In Qt Gui, a new QUrlResourceProvider class has been added that can be used to avoid subclassing QTextDocument and reimplementing loadResource(), the company said.
The Qt Quick 3D module supports morph target animations in Qt 6.1. Also available as a Technology Preview in this release is support for instanced rendering and 3D particles. According to Qt, instanced rendering can dramatically increase rendering performance when a large amount of similar items need to be rendered in the scene, and the 3D particles use instanced rendering to deliver the particle effects. Those features are expected to be fully supported in 6.2.
Away from the GUI features, Qt Network has seen the introduction of a QNetworkInformation class that expose network information about the system, while the cookie handling supports the SameSite feature. Qt said it would soon make available an updated version of Qt for Python that will provide support for the modules added in this release.
Qt 6.1 is available from the Qt download page or the online installer for Qt subscription license holders, as well as open-source users.