rviz Qt prototype available for testing

Announcement from RViz SIG Coordinator Dave Hershberger to ros-users

Rviz is moving from the wxWidgets library to the Qt library as of the ROS Fuerte release. This transition to Qt will improve RViz compatibility on more platforms and better integrate with future GUI tools. For more information on the motivation for these changes, please refer to the RViz and ROS GUI SIGs:

• http://ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Planning/rviz
• http://ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Planning/ROS GUI

This is a fairly big change to the code. The internal plugin API is changed and the Python API will be different (when I get it implemented). The GUI appears and behaves mostly the same as the wx version, most of the differences coming from the differences in style between wx and Qt and not from intentional changes. For a list of major changes, see visualization_experimental/ChangeList.

An early but fairly complete, version of the new code is available in the temporary visualization_experimental stack, which works with ROS Electric. It is available in the ros-electric-visualization-experimental debian package. This version does not have python support implemented yet, but all the built-in display types, tools, and view controllers work. I encourage rviz users to try the new version (called rviz_qt for now) before Fuerte so I can fix bugs and make the transition as smooth as possible.

Please report bugs and feature requests to the same place as usual for rviz, but with "qt" in the keywords field, like so: report a bug, request a feature, list existing tickets.

Thanks,
Dave