Nokia has pushed out Qt 4.6, with support for the Symbian platform, advanced graphics effects, and support for gesture and multi-touch support. Qt (pronounced “cute”) is an application development framework that is used for a wide array of proprietary applications and open source projects. The new release boosts developers abilities to create animations and pleasing visual effects with their applications, and boosts performance for graphics rendering.

Nokia is obviously looking pretty closely at Web development for desktop and mobile with this release as well. 4.6 improves Qt’s WebKit integration, and some features to improve QtScript, for ECMAScript (JavaScript) compatible scripting. This should be good news for projects like Arora.

Developers also get a new release of Qt Creator, the IDE for cross-platform develoment with Qt. The 1.3 release of Qt Creator boasts a slew of improvements, including the first release to target Symbian for Qt development.

Nokia made news earlier in the year by relicensing Qt under the “Lesser” GNU General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1, which made the project much more attractive for open source projects and commercial projects that might be targeting platforms like Linux.

The multitouch features are already being planned to be put to use in the KDE 4.4 release, expected in the first part of 2010, which might be a boon for Linux targeting mobile devices and tablets that can support gestures and multitouch.

The Qt 4.6 framework is immediately available for download in commercial and LGPL versions.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.