Category Archives: Qt Labs

Small status update

After Tokamak III I was not able to work that much on netbook stuff because we’re reaching the 4.6 release and we have a lot of work to be done on anchor layouts. We’re fixing the last bugs (that we know of course :P) so we can provide a really nice new layout for everybody using Qt. By the release of 4.6, Qt will be one step closer to make it easier to create rich UIs.

This week, Marco showed you how fast the netbook stuff is going on, it’s really awesome. It’s also very good to see how the netbook shell benefits from all the work being done on libplasma as well, like the integration with remote widgets. I had some nice ideas regarding integration with open Desktop stuff, let’s see if I can work on it during the weekend. I’m really looking forward the “social aspect” of KDE and how we can improve this. However, no spoilers before I get something done :).

By the end of the month (22-24 of October) I’ll give a talk on Latinoware about netbooks. I’ll use a lot of stuff from my GCDS talk but now I’ll have a lot of stuff to show off too, so I must change some bits of the presentation. On the other hand I think that this one will be much fancier and nicer to watch than the GCDS one that was more “theoretical” because all the work was at the very beginning. To show the power of remote widgets I’m planning to show a remote widget running on my netbook and also on a N900! This is not hard to achieve but I must have some time to put my hands on it.

This is the first time that I blog through an application instead of doing through the web editor. Blogilo just arrived on svn (at least for me :P) and I decided to give it a try. It’s really nice! It has all the features that the web editor gave to me like a visual editor, HTML editor and even a post preview. It supports categories (couldn’t find support for tags yet the tag support is just below it hehe) and also something like an auto configure based on the URL of your blog…really nice! I’m just missing it as a plugin for Kontact that is the place where I keep all my PIM stuff. Ah, talking about PIM I learned some nice stuff from Akonadi that I didn’t know with the series of blog posts on planet KDE about it.

KDE blog client

Ah, and before I forget: congrats to Amarok team for the release this week! I’m a “trunk user” but I know how good and stable the release is!

White as Snow

Well, last day of Tokamak. It’s sad that I must say goodbye to all of these people that actually lived with me for one week. It was so intense that I almost didn’t realize that we were together for one week. But let’s talk about what we did during the sprint.

During the first days I talked with everybody I could about anchor layouts, animated layouts and Qt stuff. It was great as it’s hard to explain the stuff and get feedback from a lot of great hackers at once and as fast as we can get when we are in this kind of developer sprints. We had great discussions about Qt, regarding bugs, features, future and everything else we could talk about. I really can see that every time that we put all these great hackers in the same room, we save some months (maybe years?) of development. All of that to make you take less time to code 😉

Plasma Developers

Plasma Developers

While everybody else was merging their brand new stuff on trunk, commiting bug fixes and new features I was fighting with cross compiling KDE to the “mysterious device” that Aaron brought to us. What I could achieve ? We have KDE 4.2.X working PERFECTLY on this device, with all the features and beauty that KDE could bring to you. It runs really really fast on this ARM device. We were all impressed!

And then came the second part of the experiment: run trunk on it. While it was ok to compile stuff on scratchbox using Maemo SDK, the lack of a proper SDK for the device gave us some headache: some bug on qmake prevented it to detect correct paths and made me find out each library that was not properly added to cmake’s links.txt file and correctly add it. By the end of kdebase compilation I already had almost all the names and did a script to fix that, but until the time I found out all the libraries it was compiling and stopping all the time (I don’t need to tell that it was really slow to compile and due to this problem, it was even slower).

After some days I finally had kdelibs + plasma-destkop and plasma-netbook compiled. However when we put all this stuff on the hardware we faced a problem with Svg files not being show. So althoughf we have plenty new stuff full of new features running on the device, it looks a little bit “ugly” without the proper background, etc.. we just have white background…white as snow. But come on…we just had a few days with the device…we can do MUCH more with it and imagine if we had a proper SDK ? We can make this hardware AWESOME with our software and I can only hope that we’ll have some more time with it in the next months…(we would need less than 1 month with a proper SDK to make it really really really ROCK!).

Ah, meanwhile it was compiling kdelibs I created the pastebin dataengine/service, migrated the pastebin applet to use that and also fixed some bugs on other applets…

Talking about snow, today was the first day I saw snow in my life 🙂 It was a unique experience for me :). It’s really hard to describe with words how happy I was and how beautiful it was in the top of that mountain. Thanks Mario for this trip…it was one of those moments in our lifes that you never forget.

Tomorrow morning I’m heading to Brazil again. It was an awesome sprint. If someone asks me what comes next from my point of view, I would answer: running plasma-netbook on the “mysterious device” (please, I just need one week with a proper SDK 😉 ), finishing and optimizing anchor layout for Qt 4.6 (I really hope this will help people out there to create rich UIs with Qt) and of course: keep all the stuff we have discussed during Tokamak going on!

Randa View

Randa View

Thank you Mario, thank you Plasma developers, thank you Qt/INdT and thank you KDE 🙂 What a wonderful personal and professional experience.

Tokamak 3

I’m at Tokamak 3 in Randa where Mario is hosting us. First of all, thanks to Mario: everything is perfect!

Great landscape surrounding us

Great landscape surrounding us

During the last days we had presentations, meetings and talks. The GSoC projects are being merged in trunk (a lot of great features coming: new widgets explorer, mouse plugins, remote widgets, plasmate), the netbook stuff is going on, Qt stuff being solved, etc..

I talked about QGraphicsAnchorLayout, the new layout engine that will be present on Qt 4.6 and even did a small demo about that. We are nailing down the remaining bits (API, bugs) and hopefully we’ll have an awesome layout engine to create rich UIs when Qt 4.6 comes to “the streets” !

I’m also working with Alexis (darktears) to debug some problems that we’re facing with the raster engine on embedded devices. The thing is that the performance was not so good as it was in 4.5.0 and we’re tracking down where is the regression. Besides that we already tested Qt 4.6 on some hardware that we have here and the performance is much better than 4.5.X (regarding GraphicsView). While we wait Qt cross compiling, I’m also updating the pastebin applet to provide a nice dataengine/service so other plasmoids/applications can take advantage of this.

Until now, it has been a great sprint with lot of work being done on Plasma and on Qt 4.6. It’s awesome how much our speed increases when we are together! 😉

Talking about Qt at local university

It was a really great experience to talk about the basic concepts of Qt and to present new features such as the Animation framework to people that had never used Qt before.

Before lunch we had an overall look at QObjects (signals/slots), QWidgets, canvas based interfaces (QGraphicsView) and other basic stuff. After lunch we had “hands on” activities so people could create small applications. At first we created an address book using regular QWidgets, later we created our own QGraphicsWidget and played with canvas based interfaces and at the end we took a look at QAnimation.

You can take a look at the slides here (it’s in portuguese) and in one week we’ll announce the winners of a challenge: create an application using Qt. The prize for the best two applications will be free entrances for Bossa Conference 2010!

Regarding Bossa Conference, stay tuned for the call of papers that will be announced soon! Now I’m looking forward bringing this kind of training to other universities and doing more advanced trainings at UFPE.

Qt Labs Americas is ready!

Hello!

During my presentation on GCDS/aKademy, I talked about the Qt Labs America and that it would be released soon. Some of you may have heard about it on the dot too.

But, what is this Qt Labs Americas thing ? Well, taken from the “about” page:

Qt Labs Americas is an openBossa initiative aiming the growth of local Qt and KDE communities all over America, starting in Brazil.

So right now we are launching the website and people are welcomed to send us links to their feeds so we can aggregate them on our planet and we’ll always try to have content in three languages: portuguese, spanish and english.

There you can find projects that we give some kind of support and also partners in this initiative. We are also on identi.ca and twitter.

So, check it out and if you can be part of it in some way or you represent a university in Brazil please contact us! The website is: http://qtlabs.openbossa.org .

Cheers!

The theory behind the code

I’ll not talk about GCDS on this post: others said everything one could tell about the conference! 🙂 It was really awesome: meeting KDE people is just an awesome experience. It was good also to see more brazilians in the conference (after FISL, the brazilian kde community seems to have started to grow or at least organize more itself) . Ah, during GCDS I joined for the first time the e.V. assembly and it’s really good the feeling that I’m helping the KDE community a little bit more. KDE is all about it’s community and it’s community is great! Well, enough with the sentimental part. Let’s talk about the theory behind the code of plasma-netbook.

Newspaper Activity ready for the presentation

Newspaper Activity ready for the presentation

During GCDS I did a presentation about this project, explaining a little bit our ideas and why we had them. I also used the time to definetely fix the name of the project to plasma-netbook (instead of plasma-mid). This was done to reflect the objective of the project. We created the project to avoid the idea of putting a full desktop inside a netbook (using concepts that don’t fit well on the device), and we can’t fall into the same problem trying to have something for MID devices also.

It was good to see the interest of the community around the project and also to see that some vendors are already contacting us to ship their devices with our netbook shell. Great also to see that the Kubuntu team will have a “Kubuntu Netbook Remix” project and if we can deliver in time our stuff, they want to use it on their project.

One thing that is also really important about the project is the fact that we want to create a new user experience on these devices. KDE is not about a specific project anymore, it’s all about the user experience: starting on the desktop shell and going far away on social interaction, media, etc. Thinking about this we want to improve this experience by delivering great features such as the open Social plasmoid, the new wikipedia runner and others that will come with the time. This way, when some random user buys his brand new netbook, running KDE he will enter our world, he’ll start to fell part of something more and that was the strategy that saved a fruit company that makes computers and devices (they create a new experience around their devices). I really hope that the community and also vendors can see the potential that we have in our hands and start helping us on this journey and to believe that it’s possible.

If you want to read the paper that I wrote about this, download it here and also my presentation here. You can also check Marco’s last post about the current status of the project.

During my presentation I announced the Qt Labs America project and I hope to give more news for you really soon….ah, and the talk about Qt layouts (including live demos of anchor layouts and animated layouts) by my fellows Caio and Eduardo was also great. If you couldn’t watch it, stay tuned to the videos that the conference will publish (I hope so 😛 ).

Now I’m really looking forward Tokamak3. I hope I can go but I have a lot of “ifs”. Let’s see what happens next weeks.