got my hands on one of Philips rad new phones, the Philips 968 available now in China.
This phone has an incredible video camera, among other things. And runs linux, of course. It’s got USB, video out(!), and a sd card slot.
Now, if I can just get KDE to sync with this somehow…
Well, Qtopia 2.2 is out, Trolltech is diligently working on Qtopia 4 (with some really great improvements!), it is almost summer here in the southern hemisphere, and I am headed for my first real vacation since I started with Trolltech. Bringing my Aussie family to Colorado (and having a brief wintertime)! So I am leaving the flip-flops (or thongs, as they say here), my tropical button down shirts, my short pants, the swimming pool, the ocean beaches, the warmth, for mostly cold, sometimes snowing, two or three layer winter clothes.
But being the Community guy here at Qtopia, I don’t _really_ get a vacation unless I turn all my computers and handheld devices off. Because I come from the Kde/Qt/Qtopia community, and this is where a lot of my passion is. So anytime I am online, I liaise. and besides me being a work-a-holic and really enjoying my job (most of the time), can’t really say I won’t do any work things on my holidaze.
Some of my holidaze planning being:
among others….
I already can’t wait to get back to the warmth and sunshine of Brisbane! What a great place to live. well, besides the spiders. and snakes. and sharks. but the bats in my back yard are friggin cool!
It hasn’t snowed here in years. Probably never has snowed here. Probably never will. In fact, it’s hot. I’m not used to the heat (even yet - being here for two years now), so I am hunkered inside with the air con on. Going back at christmas to Colorado. Which should be fun, as my Australia wife has never seen snow. I cannot _wait_ to throw a snowball at her! I won’t be as mean to huck a slushball at her though. She’d probably cry.
Sitting here watching a Qt-x11 4 compiling going on, as well as a ‘documentary’ about Soviet UFO investigations. No teambuilding here at home, so it’s taking quite some time. Not quite as long as a complete Qtopia or Opie compile. hmm.. Saturday afternoon…
I’m currently playing with KDevelop’s new parser to get symbols from a C++ library into the LSB database. With Roberto’s latest optimizations, parsing all of Qt’s headers (including preprocessing them) takes only a few seconds. If you want to play with it, the source is in KDE’s svn, playgound/utils/lsbcpp.
Life in Brissie is great!
World class ocean beaches nearby, relatively warm temperatures all year long (never freezes, anyway), friendly people where no shoes are the norm… BBQ’s all year long!! Not to mention I work for a great company that has a wonderful office environment that includes free lunches, excersize equipment, flexible work hours and creative fridays!
Not many people know Trolltech has a development office in Brisbane, Australia. The problem is, not many people know we have a development office in Brisbane Australia and we are expanding and need developers to join us.
Not many people know about about Qtopia.net, either. (shameless plug)
Actually, it is a bit cloudy and might rain today. But that still doesn’t mean it’s not a sunny day here in Brissie!
Now to display a few myths about Australia:
1) No one here drinks Fosters. Thats because we export all the bad beer and keep the good stuff for ourselves.
2) No one puts “shrimps on the barby”. It would be “prawns on the barby”, if we did.
3) Only one person ever exclaims “Crickey!”
4) There is no such thing as a dropbear, except if you are talking about small, ssh software.
QPalette is a wonderful class, but it’s easy to get confused when trying to deal with it “properly”, that is, always draw the correct shape with the right look based on the current palette.
Issues emerge quickly for style authors (or widget authors that pick colors from the palette). It starts with painter brushes and pens, which are easily confused with palette brushes and colors. It then moves onto QPalette roles as opposed to widget roles. If you want to use the QPalette::Base color role when filling a rect using a brush, you have the choice to either select the palette brush or color for the painter brush. And you can set a palette brush onto a painter pen, if you want to draw texture lines or gradient lines. But what happens if the widget is set up to use a different background role?
The widget background role is, among other things, used by the window system to draw the widget’s system background. It is also used by Qt to decide what to fill the exposed/updated widget background with before paintEvent() is invoked. So if you set Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground, which implicitly sets Qt::WA_NoBackground (Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent in Qt 4.1), the widget background role is no longer used by Qt. For this reason, the widget background role should not be a great concern of the style writer - any attempt to use it (for blending, or dithering perhaps) doesn’t adapt well to changes in the widget surroundings or ancestry. If you need it when writing a style, you can access it through the individual style functions’ widget pointers (remember to check for w == 0!).
The painter pen is used for stroking (sic), *cough*, drawing outlines. The painter brush is used for filling shapes when calling “draw” operations on the painter. So if you draw a rect by calling QPainter::drawRect(), the painter pen will draw the rect outline, and the painter brush will be used to fill the inside of the rectangle. If you do not set the brush (or set the brush equal to Qt::NoBrush), the rect will not be filled, and similar with the pen, the rect will not get stroked.
The palette brush can be set on either a painter pen or a painter brush. You will typically see code like this for when drawing lines using a texture or a gradient:
// Use the QPalette::Button role’s brush entry as a pen
painter->setPen(QPen(palette.button(), 0));
painter->drawLine(rect.topLeft(), rect.topRight());
And if the Button role of the palette has a texture brush, you’ll get a “texture line”, as opposed to the common plain-old-color line. You can think of the palette brush as really just an extension of QColor that is commonly used for filling, in conjunction with a painter brush. But you can also set a palette brush on a painter pen. Because QBrush can contain a color, the palette color is mostly for simplicity (as generating a color palette is faster and easier to work with).
| Motif | Plastique 2 /research |
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| Motif style works quite OK with different variations over the palette. | Plastique style, work in progress, is already looking pretty good. |
Understanding the relationship between colors, pens, brushes, brushes, and roles is essential when writing an adaptable modern style. And it’s tough work; some would say it’s questionable to try to make a style support all types of palette variations. But if you get it right, the results can be quite pleasing.
Made it to LinuxWorld in Frankfurt. The trade show is pretty busy, our booth is constantly well visited. We have a nice 42″ plasma screen where we’re demoing Qt and the Qt painting demos. The SVG vector drawing looks just great on such a screen.
Every day, we’re giving out an Archos device, just watch one of the 10-minutes presentations to get the secret password. Fill it into the form and be there at 16:00 for the draw.
A bit late, but here’s my little update the week before last week’s adventures at the second of two arrangements for the Trolltech Developer Days 2005 in San Jose. I traveled together with Zack and Marius on a Lufthansa flight to MUC on Tuesday 1st. Checked in at the Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel, and spent the rest of the day eating German Kirsche-cheeze Kuchen/cake. The Sheraton was certainly more than what I’d expect from a hotel, except that the only Internet access I had at my room was an ISDN line, and their wireless internet access was lobby-only, and they didn’t have _any_ power outlets there, but their Weiss was good and so all was good. Jasmin even tried some nasty banana Weiss - I don’t recommend it! Update 15-11-2005: Apparently the Sheraton’s top floors (aka. “tower floors”) did have high-speed Internet access. Also, there have been reports about one power outlet hidden under a lid by a couch in the lobby, that I didn’t find. 
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| The Arabella Sheraton, beauutiful ey? | Lobby without a power outlet. |
The first evening we arranged a cocktail party for all attendees, and it was a very well attended gig. We got to meet up with lots of Qt developers, and learned about everyone’s first encounters with Qt 4! And I was surprised to see that most were very happy to see how much has improved since Qt 3. We used the occasion to make notes on how to improve porting from Qt 3 to Qt 4, which is still a somewhat tedious process. Our partners were on place, of course, and I only just got to sneak in for a picture. There were about 400 people attending the conference, and quite a few of them found their way to this cocktail party!
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| Harri and Reggie - executive frogs. | Jasmin and Trenton, drinking some nasty banana Weiss beer. |
Wednesday, the first of two conference days, started with a welcoming talk from Eirik (President of TT), and Qt 4.x eyes-ups from Matthias, followed by keynotes with graphs pointing upwards - many of us presenters spent the time during these keynotes to prepare for the talks after lunch. The conference main room was huge!
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| The main conference room was huge, and packed with developers. | An series of columns showing great growth. |
So in the afternoon sessions, we again held our talks in the three sessions - Up Front, In Depth, and Embedded. In my presentation I think we had almost 250 people, so almost twice as many as in San Jose. An awesome experience, and I can’t wait to come up with a good talk for next year’s event :-).
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| 250 people at the threading talk. | Roberto tries to explain how to use Designer with the Controller pattern. |
After the event, we all went out for a nice meal and celebrated the successful event.
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| Celebrating trolls! | I managed to catch two Aarons dancing. |
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. Hope to see those of you who attended it again soon!
I challenge anyone to come up with cold, hard facts and numbers about kde vs gnome / qt vs. gtk+ memory usage and performance. Please, _someone_ do some real analysis on this. I need facts, not conjucture! Enough of the FUD!
Before I left Munich, I had a short chat with Roberto about Qtopia, editors and kdevelop. It got me thinking that indeed, kdevelop’s Qtopia and Opie integration needs to be better (i.e. updated). At least for application and plugin templates. I did some initial work with a Qtopia application template some time ago, but because of differing Qt versions, it was not as flash as a regular Qt application template. You have to make sure you use the correct version of designer among other things, so you can’t just click on a qtopia .ui, from within kdevelop, edit it, and expect this to work, as it will open it up into Designer 3, which will make an incompatible user interface file.
Then there is the whole cross compiler thing.
To be fair to Roberto, I do use kdevelop. I have used kdevelop (not exclusively) since .65 (I think it was), and it has gotten heaps better. 
Especially with Qtopia 4 being based on Qt 4, Qtopia app template integration, and general Qtopia development will be quite a bit better than it is now. Whereas current Qtopia and Opie development with kdevelop is cumbersome if you want to use kdevelop for more than just an editor. Both Qtopia and Opie use a different designer version, as well as a different version of qmake!
This got me thinking.. there are minikde and microkde sources around the net. Perhaps it would be good if these were “standardized” and integrated as it’s own “microkde library” in Opie. (Qtopia would benefit from this as well). There are a couple kde apps into Opie (tinykate, kcheckers, kpacman, embeddedkonsole - but most do not use any kde code), as well as konq-e. This could bring about easier “porting” of kde applications to both Opie and Qtopia. Problem is, there are a few differing versions of “microkde” out there.
