The Haiku alpha is barely out the door, and we already have another important news item about the open source reimplementation of the BeOS. About 18 months ago, Evgeny Abdraimov started porting the Qt4 graphical toolkit to Haiku, and now, we ave some seriously epic screenshots showing a multitude of Qt4 applications running in Haiku, as well as a developer preview release.

Gerasim “3dEyes” Troeglazov and Anton Sokolov have joined Abdraimov in the porting effort, which ishosted at OsDrawer, the hosting service for open source Haiku projects. This summer, they could show off the analog clock unning on Haiku, but right now, they’ve got a whole boatload of Qt4 applications, running in Haiku – including the WebKit-based Arora browser and QtDesigner.

The screenshots show Qt4 applications from all walks of life running inside Haiku. In the screenshot showing Arora, I can even see some theme integration work going on there for Qt4 applications, which should, eventually, make them indistinguishable from regular Haiku applications.

You can grab the first developer preview from BeOSFrance. This porting effort is a testament to the Haiku operating system and the three developers leading the porting effort, but of course also to Qt4 itself. Well done, everyone!