While planning for Developer Days 2008 I tried to wring something interesting out of my technically starved brain to show off to the crowds of hackers attending. At the time I had just noticed Twitter, a service that seemed to promise the value of Facebook without all the junk - seeing status updates from my friends and the ramblings from people I find interesting or useful from an academic perspective.

I started looking into the Twitter API and found that using Qt’s QNetworkAccessManager I could quickly create something powerful that interoperated with URL API’s. Attempting to be different, I decided that it wouldn’t be cool to create a UI based on traditional QWidgets, and definately too boring to simply browse twitter.com. So, using the Twitter API which returns XML data, QtXmlPattern’s XSLT support and a little bit of creative tinkering with exposing Qt native objects to QtWebKit, I ended up with a useful Twitter client that converted the XML data to UI.

After returning from Developer Days, we enlisted the help of Girish - a(n ex )Troll and Generally Great Guy who helped polish my haphazardly written demo-code into something beautiful and functional - as well as write a completely new example on how to integrate with YouTube! Girish also made some nice screencasts for our Qt 4.5 launch (source follows after);

And now we have finally pushed the two cool examples of QtWebKit that shows how easy and elegant it is to mixing web programming paradigms with native code in Qt! If you want to try it out, play with it, modify it, please head over to the Graphics Dojo and look for twitterview and videofeed. Happy hacking!