Collecting Ideas

I want to blog about some cool things to do for the KDE project on week-1 2010. I’ve got just a couple of good ideas, so I’m asking you to add your ideas so we can make a good collection of nice things to do. You can either reply to this post (don’t be shy, just post it!) or send it to me at <enrico.ros@gmail.com>.

Sharing your idea with the community raises the chance of seeing it implemented!

I confess, I’m addiQted. You obviously think it’s normal (you’re not reading this blog by accident, aren’t you?) but it wasn’t always like this: I’ve liked some previous versions, but the upcoming Qt 4.6 really rocks!

The Fotowall case

As I shown previosly, Fotowall already uses some features of Qt 4.6. How much?
Qt 4.6 is referenced in 32 places, for example in snippets like this:

    // center the path
    QPointF pathCenter = path.boundingRect().center();
    #if QT_VERSION >= 0x040600
        path.translate(-pathCenter);
    #elif QT_VERSION >= 0x040500
        path = QTransform::fromTranslate(-pathCenter.x(), -pathCenter.y()).map(path);
    #else
        QTransform tx;
        tx.translate(-pathCenter.x(), -pathCenter.y());
        path = tx.map(path);
    #endif

From simple path translations to more complex property manipulations, everything got better. See this code snipped about extending QGraphicsObject in 4.6 versus 4.5 and 4.4.

    #if QT_VERSION >= 0x040600
    class AbstractContent : public QGraphicsObject
    #else
    class AbstractContent : public QObject, public QGraphicsItem
    #endif
    {
        Q_OBJECT
    #if QT_VERSION < 0x040600
        Q_PROPERTY(QPointF pos READ pos WRITE setPos)
        Q_PROPERTY(qreal rotation READ rotation WRITE setRotation NOTIFY rotationChanged)
    #endif
    #if QT_VERSION < 0x040600 && QT_VERSION >= 0x040500
        Q_PROPERTY(qreal opacity READ opacity WRITE setOpacity)
    #endif

Do you feel the pain?

I Need it

I need a world with Qt 4.6 only, because:

• It’s too much of a pain to support older versions in the same codebase
• It’s not even fair, because non-4.6 users won’t enjoy the program as it’s meant to be
• I can’t use A TON of new features because they’ll either simplify too much the code, or just because they don’t have a pre-4.6 equivalent
• and because I’d like to finally use
  • QGraphicsEffect for Fotowall’s content
  • QVector3D to say goodbye to enricomath.h
  • QGesture for multi-finger interaction
  • QPropertyAnimation to its full potential!

More 4.6 TEASING

1. As you seem to like videos, here is a preview of something we’re working on for Amarok Qt 4.6 only!!
   

   Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Also, since I’m soooo much a giver, see the new Fotowall’s Word Cloud feature, coming in 0.9

See you @ Munich

I’m packing for the DevDays 2009 Munich. See you there

Cherry picked  features from the delicious 0.8 release:

• Now you’ll be able to deform text changing the shape of its baseline visually (see the “Fotowall” string in the image above and its Bezier control points)
• Pictures can be cropped to a certain area, for example to select a single person from a group. Also picture’s transparency can be adjusted, to create nice fading effects
• A lot of work has been put into enabling OpenGL acceleration, really useful if your canvas has 100+ semi-transparent objects
• You can now work with a transparent window (or blurred, on Vista)
• The top-bar is now context-sensitive. We’ll move more and more content properties to that instead of the old content configuration window

Plus a lot of user suggestions and fixes have been implemented to make Fotowall always easier and intuitive to use. The 0.8 release now ships in 6 different languages: english, italian, french, german, brazilian, polish. You can even contribute your own translations.

But our favorite news is that Fotowall now has it’s official website

What about next: we’re working hard on the 0.9 release and we already have lots of new features! You’ll be surprised by what you’ll be able to achieve with the next version

A final special thank to Zack Rusin who created the Text on path example that was the basis of our shaped text.

Once upon a time, a little application called quax was landed on kde-apps. As imagination is better served by a picture, here is what quax looks like:

Quax after being ported to Qt 4.5.

It’s nothing but a simple and easy to use screen magnifier. You can move it around and place it near the detail to magnify. Plus it lets you pick the color of a pixel. It’s the perfect tool when you’re tuning the style, pixels and gradients of your beloved app It had only one drawback: it was build with Qt 3.

Porting Quax to Qt4

It was the first time I had to port an application from Qt3 to Qt4. Here are some stats:

• The porting took 3 hours (you can see it from the git history, dinner included )
• I did the following:
  • create the project files
  • use qt3to4 with that files
  • make it compile disabling some code chunks
  • re-enable the disabled code in a qt4 way
  • disabled qt3 support from the .pro file and fixed all until it compiled
  • update the packaging informations, readme’s
  • published Quax 4 in kde-apps
• The source code dropped from 670 to 547 lines of code. So Qt4 saved 14% of code compared to Qt3 for this project.
• The cleanness went drastically up, the API of Qt4 is a big improvement over that of Qt3.
• I can’t talk about speed or graphics improvements.. but if you look at the old screenshots you’ll see that the font rendering was really improved in Qt4

Conclusion

Finally I have quax back, and you can have it too! The source code is on gitorious, and here is the kde-apps page. A final thank word to Claudiu Costin (the original author) and Vlad Oancea (the skin designer). I won’t maintain quax4 and I don’t plan to add any features, I’m just glad I can keep my box Qt3 free while designing pixel-perfect graphics thanks to this cute little utility

The official homepage remains on my gitorious web-automation project. All the other old clones, like the ones on github are outdated and will (hopefully) disappear in time, as the development continues on gitorious.

Have fun

Please enjoy this HQ stream of deceptive video pixels while I explain this fine new piece of trickery

Click here to view the embedded video.

As you can see, this other frustration-driven program lets you climb the ladder of a typical facebook game while drinking coffee or feeding your pet!

So, before starting you need:

1. a dictionary file for your language of choice (1 word per line)
2. a dictionary file with the names of your facebook friends (for the ‘bonus’ levels)
3. a compiler, because I’m not making binary packages this time
4. the source code of AutoGram, published here and available as a tar.gz here.

Build it with your favourite compiler (tested on Linux with gcc and on Windows with msvc) or your favourite IDE (you can download QtCreator if you don’t know what an IDE is and click on the autogram.pro project file). Then Run it and embarass your friends

Here is how the program works:

1. grabs the screen image and cuts off the 6 images representing the letters.  [ScreenCapture.h]
2. recognizes each character by comparing the image to the alphabet and picks the match that has less differential energy. (is like xor-ing 2 pictures and computing the energy of that)  [Ocr.h]
3. performs all the permutations of the characters, to find out all the words that can be made out of the given alphabet. [Scrambler.h]
4. validates with a dictionary to filter out unknown words. the dictionary is the “main language dictionary” if the screen is yellow-ish (indicating normal game) or the “bonus game dictionary” if the screen is red-ish (indicating a bonus game, where all the words are picked from the names of your friends).  [Scrambler.h]
5. injects the words (as keystrokes + return) to the browser window.  [InputUtils.h]
6. there is a timer-based loop that performs the operations 1-5 while updating the GUI.  [WCGame.h contains the logic, AppWidget.h handles the GUI]

If you run AutoGram on a virtual machine, please remember to switch it off after a while! I take no responsability of any score overflow

Again here is the source code, stay tuned for more web automation articles, and enjoy

update: XP/Vista download here

You are happily wasting time on facebook (that site with all the ignore buttons, with noisy stuff from people who call themselves ‘friends’ of you.. you know..) when you unfortunately get hooked up with Biotronic. This flash game is quite nice, but there is a rank ladder on bottom and you’re last. So you play and play … still last, play even more.. still last.. can you see the frustration?! The layman’s answer is to play (aka waste hours) to get better and climb the ladder..

And then there’s the programmer’s answer: I’ll write a Qt program to get me on top!! (yes, and still waste hours ) — Here is the result: BioCheat

Click here to view the embedded video.

The game is in FLASH, so no HTML or DOM tricks, you have to emulate eyes, brains and hands (only 1). Or in other words you have to see, think and act. Or in other words you have to recognize the image, solve the puzzle and send the clicks back.

Not only I became the first among my friends, I was the world #1 for a month (with 5Million points) Then they wisely reset my score to zero (was too high for a human player) and many people started using and modifying BiCheat!

Here is the simple work flow of the program:

Plus when there is near 60% of recognized blocks, a condition telling that the level is finished, we press the “next” button (a mouse click at an absolute position) to go to the next level. Then you can go grooming your cat while BioCheat plays for you.

In the end it’s a machine vs machine fight, not a human-to-machine one

Again here is the source code, stay tuned for more web automation articles, and enjoy

Lista dei miei sorvegliati speciali 2009

• nepomuk “Improving Search and Virtual Folders”
  creazione di un widget standard per la ricerca con Nepomuk da integrare in Dolphin, nel File Dialog, etc.. e miglioramento del backend ‘nepomuksearch:’ + virtual folder (es. Immagini = tutte le immagini presenti nel pc)

• phonon “Visualizations”
  estrae statistiche (spettro, metriche varie) dal flusso audio di Phonon per fornire i dati a visualizzatori. Utile per tutto kdemultimedia oltre ai vu-meter fai da te!

• kdevelop “C++ refactoring support”
  datecelo e svilupperemo al triplo della velocita’ dateci anche “static code visualization” e ci regalate un altro emisfero cerebrale. (il motore C++ di kdevelop spaccadibbrutto, la gui/workflow e’ 10 volte meno usabile di QtCreator)

• plasma “New Widget Explorer”
  l’attuale ‘just sucks’.. c’e’ bisogno di disabilitare i plasmoidi non validi, di raggrupparli per tipologia, di avere un dialog che presenti piu’ contenuto in molto meno spazio (e speriamo che tolgano l’odiosa stellina mangia spazio )

• plasma “PlasMate Editor”
  puo’ aiutare la diffusione dei plasmoidi, ma solo *se fatto a regola d’arte*, altrimenti brucia la bonta’ di plasma.

• plasma “Media Center Components”
  componenti Multimediali per Plasma. Alessandro puo’ fare un bel lavoro qui. Optimization is needed btw

Ce ne sono ovviamente molti altri di interessanti (tra i 38 assegnati a KDE), e non parliamo dei progetti di Gnome, LLVM, GCC, Gentoo, e degli altri 900

Al via il Summer of Code 2009 di google.

Questa la lista delle tematiche che saranno finanziate nel programma di quest’anno:

- ambienti desktop [KDE, GNOME, Elightenment, Maemo]
- browser [Mozilla, Chromium]
- codec audio/video [FFmpeg, GStreamer, VideoLAN, Audacity]
- compilatori [LLVM, GCC, Mono, GNU tools, Eclipse]
- database [MySQL]
- distribuzioni Linux [Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Pardus]
- motori 3D [Crystal Space, OGRE]
- progetti universitari [Harvard, Michigan, Berkeley, Oregon, Portland]
- programmi per grafica [Blender, GIMP, Inkscape]
- programmi per versioning [git, Mercurial, Subversion]
- programmi scientifici [SciLab, R foundation]
- sistemi operativi [Linux, Minix, Wine, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan 9]
- sviluppo web [Apache, Rails, WordPress, Joomla, Moinmoin, Moodle]
- …vari che iniziano per open [OpenOffice, OpenStreetMap, OpenSSH]

Questo modo di finanziare ricerca di base su larga scala farà emergere, come ogni anno, progetti interessanti ed il contributo migliorerà in media la qualità dei maggiori progetti opensource.
Spero che la partecipazione da parte degli studenti dell’Università degli Studi di Padova sarà significativa, dato che la relazione con google è molto qualificante ed i soldi che entrano in tasca non sono pochi!

Le Qt 4.5 saranno rilasciate sotto LGPL. Per la gioia di tutti i set-top-box maker (tra i quali spiccano alcune realta’ hi-tech italiane!), dei produttori di dispositivi embedded/mobili, o semplicemente di chi fa programmi per computer: non si dovranno piu’ pagare costi fissi (di licenza) e/o variabili (runtime royalties) per le Qt!

Effetti collaterali:
• esiste ora uno stack software completo (kernel linux, toolchains, librerie Qt) per creare nuovi dispositivi ‘consumer’ senza sborsare un cent in licenze
• ci sara’ una migrazione da parte di chi usa altri toolkit (magari tecnologicamente inferiori, o piu’ complessi da usare, o non gratuiti.. es: gtk+, vxwidgets, .net) verso le Qt
• tramite meccanismi a catena, e’ attesa una vasta diffusione della tecnologia, infatti come Nokia stessa prevede:
  

  in the long term, the benefits of adopting a participatory development model and accelerating development far outweighed the value of the revenue stream that it could generate by selling commercial licenses.

E qual’e’ la relazione con la farfalla? Che una societa’ decide una nuova strategia commerciale e subito il tuo curriculum diventa 10 volte piu’ appetibile !!!
(…usciro’ dal Dei, prima o poi… )