Nokia has released an early technical preview of Qt Creator, a new open source integrated development environment that is cross-platform compatible and designed to accelerate Qt application development. The IDE has built-in debugging tools and is tightly integrated with the Qt Designer user interface layout tool.

I've spent a few days testing it to see how it compares to other development solutions. It has a nice user interface and it offers a decent assortment of useful features. I typically prefer to use Vim for coding, so I tend to dislike the structure and overhead of most IDE tools. Qt Creator is relatively lightweight and doesn't feel as fat or confining as some alternatives.

The autocompletion and new project wizard will be useful for new Qt developers. The environment will make it easier for them to bootstrap projects and get started on development without having to figure out how all the pieces fit together. The 200 MB Windows installer bundles MinGW and the Qt libraries, so it can be used by itself to supply a complete Qt developer environment. Linux packages are available for 32-bit and 64-bit systems and are 22MB and 27MB respectively. The Mac OS X build requires the user to have already installed the Qt binary package.

My favorite feature is the integrated QuickOpen search tool, which feels a little bit like Deskbar and can be used to find and quickly jump to a line in the current document, a specific class or method, or any file. Another feature that I really like is the split view for contextual API help. It will open a pane with documentation for whatever happens to be under the cursor.

For a more detailed overview of the features in Qt Creator, check out this blog entry by Eike Ziller, one of the Nokia developers who helped make the IDE. To see how Qt Creator compares to the KDE project's KDevelop IDE, check out this blog entry by KDE developer Aaron Seigo. You can also find an informative review at the KDE news site.