Kongsberg SIM is pleased to announce the first preview release of Quarter. This initial release provides a preview of our new Gui binding for Coin.

Quarter is a light-weight glue library that provides seamless integration between Systems in Motions's Coin high-level 3D visualization library and Trolltech's Qt 2D user interface library.

Qt and Coin is a perfect match since they are both open source, widely portable and easy to use. Quarter has evolved from Kongsberg SIM's own experiences using Coin and Qt together in our applications.

The functionality in Quarter revolves around QuarterWidget, a subclass of QGLWidget. This widget provides functionality for rendering of Coin scenegraphs and translation of QEvents into SoEvents. Using this widget is as easy as using any other QWidget.

Quarter also comes with a plugin for Qt Designer, Trolltech's tool for designing and building GUIs. Once you install Quarter, the QuarterWidget becomes accessible in Qt Designer, and you can include it in the user interfaces you create. The plugin facility also provides you with the capability of dynamically loading ui files containing a QuarterWidget in your application.

By using Coin, Qt and Quarter to build your 3D graphics applications, you have the power to write software that is portable across the whole range of UNIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, from a 100% common codebase.

This preview release works with version 2.5 of Coin. Release of version 1.0 (which will work with Coin 3.0) is planned for January 26th 2009.