One of the troubles of world travel is coming in contact with new virus and such, especially those that cause sinusitis. So I decided to stay home today. This is the first real illness I have had for quite a few years, so I am actually overdue.

With the internet, I can do some of the same work as I do in the office. But seeing as its free time, I will probably get started porting gutenbrowser to qt4 (seeing as there are at least 2 people interested in seeing it move forward!), instead of waiting til x.3.x release to port it to a new Qt like I did last time (which was actually a aptch from someone else!). Thats the plan anyway. At the same time, fold the Qtopia as well as the Opie version back into the desktop tree. Since Qtopia 4 isn’t quite ready for release, I can concentrate on the desktop side of things.

I usually get started doing something, and then get distracted or get inspired to do music recording. or somesuch thing. Speaking of which, there is a certain pending software release that needs a “cute” jingle…. hmm.. “Qtopia 4 shuffle”? “Qtopia 4 jig”?.. “Qtopia 4 hoedown”? Perhaps something more Australian… “Qtopia 4 barby”….

So here’s my little update on last week’s adventures at the first of two arrangements for the Trolltech Developer Days 2005 in San Jose. I traveled together with Zack, Roberto, Marius and Gunnar on an SAS/Virgin flight to SFO on Saturday the 15th. Spent the weekend bio-adjusting to The American Way, and on Monday, we checked in at the Hayes Mansion, about 30 minutes away from down town San Jose. The Hayes is certainly more than what I’d expect from a mansion, but apart from a really noisy room at night and somewhat pricy facilities, their Weiss was good and so all was good.

The Hayes Mansion, beauutiful ey?	The ballroom, where most of the dev day stuff happened.

The first day was for two tracks of training, where our partners ICS and KDAB held an introductory track to Qt based on Qt 4, and a second track about moving from Qt 3 to Qt 4. The training was pretty well attended. The introductory track was quite early on split into two sessions, one introductory and another Qt 3 to Qt 4 track was spawned off. Roberto, Mike and I assisted Jesper from KDAB as he went through mostly all aspects of the Qt 4 libraries.

A nice big presentation	…and enough computers for everyone

That evening, TT’s founders held a party where everyone mingled into a what seemed at the time like a tiny bar in the basement level of the Hayes mansion. I guess it was just packed ;-). There were tons of conference attendees there, partner booths, and all us trolls. Most of my pictures came out bad for some reason (…), but at least Harri and Reggie’s pose same out OK:

Former senior trolls, now … senior frogs? Harri and Reggie from FrogLogic.

I think there were about 180 people attending the conference, and they might all at one point have been at that bar at once ;-). The next day started with a welcoming talk from Håvard (CEO at TT), and Qt 4.x eyes-ups from Matthias, followed by Gary Forni from Intel and Erric Solomon of Synopsys giving talks about how cool Qt is and with some graphs pointing upwards and all that :-). Good warmups for the talks that started promptly after lunch.

The main conference room was packed with developers.	Marius holding a very good talk about Qt 4’s Model-View architecture.

I myself had the first talk in the Qt-In-Depth track, about threaded programming. The atmosphere in the room was amazing! Apart from being overly packed (that’s 3 times), everyone seemed eager to suck up some good inspiration on the world of threading. Very inspiring for me as a presenter. The questions were good and many, and I got an impression that people were all walking around with a big smile on their face, letting me know, after my talk, what threading models they were using in their business, and how much code they could nuke after the
improvements in Qt 4. And after the day was over, party!

That’s Aaron Seigo dancing with some hillbillies from somewhere, I don’t know where ;-).	Relaxing in the sun, having a good time.

So finishing up, I really don’t have space to show you all the material I’ve got from the party after the conference hehe, but it was great fun.

I heard the Münich event for next week is fully booked, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Back in the Australian home. Beat up and weary from a heap of air travel that included getting stuck on the tarmac twice in two different airports for 1) having too much fuel (wtf!?! - 3 hours on the plane for them to find someone to pump out excess fuel) and nearly missing the international connection flight. and 2) engines would not start. Aux power failed when they tried to start the engines. Towed back to gate and then the engines “could not get enough air to start”. hmmm, ok. Really builds the confidence for this airline. Will avoid this one where possible.

Things learned:
L.A. is a ridiculous airport.
San Jose has terrible traffic.
Glad I call Australia home.

It was good to meet people only known from emails, see the California office, and talk face to face with developers. Met our CTO, and our new VP of Professional Services.

Now I am going to sleep for two days…

So as some of you might have seen, a lot of our devs are over in San Jose basking in the sun and basically just enjoying themselves at the Dev Days. The rest of us are back in cold Oslo toiling away on Qt 4.1.

At the moment we have just entered a freezing period for our codebase and are focusing on getting our autotests to pass and valgrind to be happy. Once that is achieved we’ll branch of so we can start working on 4.1.1 and other releases while in parallell testing the packages and finally shipping 4.1.0. If you’re on the bleeding edge just grab a snapshot from here to see whats happening.

sitting here with Aaron Seigo and Marius outside with an ipaq and wifi listening to them talking about QTreeiew. Nice sunny day, a bit of wind. Need more java! Tomorrow is my day, so today I am just hanging out. Now Scott Collins walked up. Fun fun meeting all these names I have seen.
Good to meet with devs from the community.

Jet lag really sucks. My mind thinks its 4am, but my body is telling me is 11 am. Slightly off.

I made it, and at least there is half and half. mmmmm. half & half. Looks like I will be living off of java for the next few days, as my body tries to adjust. My wife bought me a thing on using acupressure to counteract jet lag. Hopefully this works, otherwise I will be falling asleep soon.

First thing I am going to do when I get into L.A is have a cuppa java with half & half! Not milk. Not cream. Half & half! Australia, it seems has not discovered how much better half & half tastes in coffee than milk. The last two years I have taken up putting real cream into my cuppas. “Can’t you make half and half?” yes, but it isn’t the same.

Deciding what devices to bring is getting to be a chore! Need laptop (so at least I hack some code, or do some work for a few hours on the 12 hour plane ride). Need phone (roaming activated). Need ipod. Need a zaurus or two. Maybe the simpad. and the ipaq. Need power plug adapters for all the batteries. Luckily most power adapters can handle 100 - 240 volts, so I just need the fiddly-bit switcheroo on the end. Ohh, and paperback books when all the batteries die.

On a side note. Trolltech is growing so big, its getting more difficult to keep track of just who is who and who does what in the organization!

Responding to Florian’s blog from some days back about some missing features in Plastique, thing’s aren’t all that bad anymore. The menu styling is now more complete, and we are still working to make it better. There are some challenges for the Plastique style in the months to come, but I’ll come back to that at the end of this post.

First of all, exclusive menu entries from 4.0.1 looked kind of like regular check buttons ;-). That’s fixed now. Instead, we draw radio buttons like we should. And a nice other detail is that separators actions can also have text on them. The buttons also respect the sunken state now, which makes them more responsive and “life-like” than in 4.0.1. Screenshots:

Plastique, Qt 4.0.1	Plastique, Qt 4.1.0

We also touched up the Motif and CDE styles’ checkable menu actions to make them less ugly. In 4.0.1, the checkmarks were only drawn
when pressed, and they were jammed into 4×4 pixels. Now, we draw both on and off states, and also the sunken state, and we fixed the size of the checkmarks. Motif style looks a more and more like a true Motif app does. Or some of them, anyway… Screenshots:

Motif, Qt 4.0.1	Motif, Qt 4.1.0

I hope this makes up for the frustration that Florian was sharing ;-).

On a different note, lots of other things have also improved in Plastique since 4.0.1. For example, spinboxes and comboboxes now provide more contrast, and the hovering and focus highlighting looks much better. In 4.0.1, we basically drew only two enabled states for these widgets: with and without input focus, and no mouse-over effect. Without input focus, the spin box was a bit behind on the contrast, and with input focus, it just looked a bit wrong. This has been cleaned up now, so both combo boxes and spin boxes look great! As you can see below, with input focus, only the editable part of the spin box has the focus frame in it, and some pixeling has been done to make the frame nicer. Also, hovering is implemented for the individual spinbox buttons and the editable combobox button. This is different from Plastik, which draws a mouse-over effect for both spinbox buttons at once. Screenshots:

QSpinBox, Qt 4.0.1	QSpinBox, Qt 4.1.0

The main thing left for Plastique for 4.1 is to make it work properly with some of the new painting paradigms that 4.1 introduces. Plastique has been written as a color-only palette style, and it doesn’t use any alpha blending (it’s all fake!). Which is good, because it looks good even on X-servers without XRender, and that means we’ve got a modern style for all our peripheral platforms.

The problem is, these older unices generally run the CDE WM, and not KDE, and so they prefer Motif and CDE style over Plastique for consistency. So the next chapter in Plastique style history is to gradually convert it into an alphamapped style. I’ve done some initial work on it, but probably won’t finish it until 4.2 (Developer Days 2005 San Jose coming up and all). The base idea is that Plastique will work both with color palettes, gradient palettes (that is - QGradient brushes in the palette), and with textures.

Plastique, Qt 4.0.1	Plastique, Qt 4.x.x

So look forward to it! :-). And when you find issues in Plastique that need some love and care, please let us know. These things do get fixed :-).

Free software is important. The free software community is also important. Without it, none of us would be here. I wouldn’t have a job here at Trolltech if not for free software. I wouldn’t get to hack on Opie, nor would I use KDE as my desktop. The compilers we use for Qtopia would not exist. Nor would the filesystem it runs in. Imagine our world without free software. Grim. and expensive.
Saying free software is not important is like saying trees don’t matter unless they are “harvested” for commercial purposes.

On a related note, what you name it doesn’t matter a hill of beans. It’s fluff. bloat. Get on with it.

As I get ready for my first trip back to the US in two years, I am leaving a completely different world than when I arrived… a wife and our kid anxious to greet me at the airport on my return. A house full of stuff. Pets. A swim pool, palm trees, and huge bats in the backyard. A really nice life. Only a bit concerned about the switch back to driving on the other side of the road, on the other side of the car. Australia is great. Except for the vegemite, and the fact I am really tired of hearing about “dropbears”… ya, ya, ya, save it for the tourists.. it wasn’t even funny the first time I heard it. and no, I am not from Canada, and don’t call me a ‘yank’, it’s not nice. If you ever get the chance to visit Australia, do so. It’s beautiful. It’s a great place to live and be free.