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

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!

As I promised, I’m posting pictures of the Qt training that we had last Monday

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.

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!

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.

Now you can just drop an http URL on the pastebin plasmoid and it’ll give you a tiny url Nice and small feature…

Also I just committed the change of name from plasma-mid to plasma-netbook to avoid problems, confusions and all questions regarding mid devices that are not the focus right now.

Later I’ll post more news about GCDS and about my presentation/paper.

The last week I started playing with SAL: the “Search and Launch” containment for the netbook project. It was really nice as I played with Runners and could finally understand some bits that were still inside a black box for me. It’s sooo easy to use Runners on your applications!

So, the main idea behind this containment is that instead of using a regular menu like Kickoff you would be able to just search for what you’re looking for. The regular desktop already uses this feature inside KRunner but just advanced users and a few beginners know about it and how to use it properly (besides the fact that it’s trivial to use) – it’s hidden and is only triggered by a shortcut or by the menu entry “Run Command” that is not so visible.

Right now, as you can see in the screenshot below (sorry, no videos as I need to recompile some stuff to make recordMyDesktop work again) I put an edit line widget to type the queries but later this will be inside the panel. The user just types whatever he wants to do: it can be the name of an application, category (web browser), contact, calculation, unit conversion, etc.. (we’re thinking of a way to teach the user everything he is able to query – but suggestions are welcome).

Search and Launch Containment

There is also the “Favourites Strip”. When you mouse hover one of the results you’re able to add it to the Favourite Strip clicking on the “star icon”. Add as much favourites as you want and you can scroll between them in a “carousel” like widget. Maybe in the future we can make it more beautiful with Kinetic and add some bling Right now I want something that really works and we can add blings later (using Kinetic – and yes we may use animated layouts too \o/ hehe). Ah, and I really wished that we already had anchor layouts while developing SAL. It would be so easy and I would not have a lot of problems that I had to layout the widgets =/.

Now I need to make it persistent (so we are able to restore the favourites) and also remove the edit line widget and put in the panel as it was planed first.

Cheers,

Vacations are great (and probably nobody will disagree on that, right ? ). It’s a time when you can relax, think about your life, check your health (doctor, dentist, etc..), set new work goals, evaluate the old ones and also visit your family: I’m spending all the time at my girlfriend’s house and that’s awesome!

This example shows an implementation of a custom QGraphicsLayout that tries to keep the layout as much “squared” as possible.

But the main thing being shown here is that the layout deals with a QGraphicsLayoutProxy, making it transparent for someone who is just adding or removing items from the layout, so all items are automatically animated when they change a position inside the layout or we change the size of the layout.

Jeez has more explanations here, but if you want to just watch the demo, take a look at Openbossa channel or just watch it below: