I was just looking through our statistics and noticed that we have contributed over 200 error corrections for Qt 4.8 in the past 6 months. We are working hard to improve Qt Commercial to meet the needs of our customers and one important area is improving its maturity especially on desktop and embedded platforms. In addition to fixing these for our customers, our efforts benefit the entire Qt ecosystem by contributing the error corrections and functional improvements also to the Qt Project.
We have chosen the errors to fix based on two primary drivers: those that are blocking a release, and those that have been requested to be fixed by many of our customers. Release blockers are quite an easy category. Those will have to be fixed or otherwise a release does not work on all those platforms we are supporting. Some of these fixes are very relevant in all platforms, while some are crucial just for those who deploy on a certain platform. Another category is corrections requested by our customers. These typically contain problems that are important, but do not block any release. They may be errors related to behavior on some platform or a functionality that is used, for example, only on desktop.
Looking at the corrections we have provided, most are related specifically to some platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X or Solaris. Many are related to commonly used functionality such as widgets, dialogs, network and item views. Majority of the fixes are for functionality, but we have also made some fixes to documentation and some for the Qt tools.
Going forward we will continue to address both the development of new functionality and making sure that the existing functionality works as it should. All the problem reports are found in the public bug database of the Qt Project, but we are using our Qt Commercial support team, the Qt Commercial customer portal and our internal systems to decide on priority order for the fixes. So, if you are a Qt Commercial customer and need to have some issue fixed, please contact our support team. They are typically able to provide a workaround for the problem, as well as help R&D in listing the errors that are important to many of our customers.
With quite much of the development focus already moving into Qt 5, we are still investing in improving 4.8. In addition to the RTOS support, which we have been communicating a lot about lately, we are working to improve such things as support for the Mac App Store and event handling for the upcoming 4.8.1 release. After the 4.8.1, which is planned to be released in March, we aim to provide more patch releases to 4.8 throughout 2012.