The most recurrent and difficult question I get, and probably the most recurrent in the industry is how’s the world gonna look like in 5 years? What’s the next big thing?. My usual answer is “if I knew, I’ll be doing that” (and that’s probably what’s happening :)) but the point is that the horizon of predictions in this fast paced internet era is too close to us.

Two years and 6 months ago the first, rudimental and slow Android device was born. If feels like prehistory now, and it’s just 2 years ago.. then the DROIDs came, then the Galaxys, and you can see their impact on the world in this beautiful video:

Do you see how quickly this is happening? What’s in your face IS a revolution, because when you buy one of them, you don’t just get a brilliant colorful expensive eye-catching plastic toy.

What you buy is the sense of protection, for not feeling lost when travelling though neighborhoods or new cities, for always having friends within reach and multiple ways of communicating with them, for always knowing which is the closest+cheapest+healthiest+toprated Korean place, and when you are looking at your calendar and you arrive perfectly on time at that very important meeting you’ll even feel like a better person (well, this applies just to me, and few other Italians :).

Talking about the revolution, do you see it now?

Well.. I admit that I felt a little proud after seeing the good old KDE3 on the trailer of the upcoming “The Social Network“.

For those who didn’t see it, here it is:

This is a KDE desktop with:

• the Keramic widget and window decoration style (so it’s at least a KDE 3.1, released on Jan 2003)
• a konqueror window (god, I loved that browser) showing the /home/mark directory (obviously Mark Zuckerberg)
• a terminal, probably xterm, showing some wget-ting going on to fetch the pictures displayed in the other konqueror window
• a mozilla window displaying the www.eliot.harvard.edu/facebook/index.shtml URL, probably something like the directory of the house

Apart from that it all looks very standard to me.. do you see any other customization/hint on the picture?
Come on, unleash your CSI skills!! 😉

I remember it was KDE 3.2 that made me fall in love with this awesome desktop environment (it was really the top of the class at that point, with konqueror, the kio slaves, and a browser that was about to change the history) and my first opensource code commit was about 6 years and 8 months ago.. and I enjoyed every second of that. (and now it pays the bills too! lol)

Well… looks like I’ll be at the movies on Oct 1st!

The ‘focus‘ word has many meanings, ranging from the optical concept of ‘good convergence of light rays generated by an object’ to the cognitive process of directing the attention to a particular target while ignoring other targets.
Now the interesting part: this concept can be used in computers too, especially in user interfaces, to direct the user to relevant information or to help him through a step-by-step process. How to do that? Since every image you see on screen is ‘on focus’ by default, you can easily unfocus unuseful information.

Blurring is the act of altering images so they appear out of focus. My Maestro[2] and other illustriuos people already talked extensively about this topic here on planet KDE. However you don’t improve the world until a technology becomes available to everybody, right?

Then some days ago I read on notmart‘s blog that plasma and kwin supported blurring the background on windows.. so I rebuilt KDE4 svn, restarted it, and… boy.. does it make a difference! Look at Marco’s blog or at this picture I stole from him! All the popups become instantly more readable, even krunner does, and you immediately get the feeling that the plasma panel and all the systray applets really are above your desktop and they look as they were made of some glass/plastic material.

So: why limiting this just to some plasma applets? Well, I think that the usage of this effect must be wise, however I wanted that for my app too…

…’cause I like eye-candy! 😉

After a quick tour through the beautiful KDE svn I grabbed all the needed source code and loaded Fotowall in creator. Since I already had the structure for the blur-behind on windows in place, adding the KDE4 effect was really easy. Here are some samples of what you can get:

To activate the back blur you need:

• obviously an application with a transparent background. Qt easily allows to work with transparency on top-level windows.
• you have to enable the “blur” effect in kwin’s “desktop effects” configuration.
• a couple of lines of code to ask kwin to activate blurring to your window.

Here is the code that does the magic:

#if defined(Q_WS_X11)
/**
  Blur behind windows (on KDE4.5+)
  Uses a feature done for Plasma 4.5+ for hinting the window manager to draw
  blur behind the window.
*/
#include <X11/Xlib.h>
#include <X11/Xatom.h>
#include <QX11Info>
static bool kde4EnableBlurBehindWindow(WId window, bool enable, const QRegion &region = QRegion())
{
    Display *dpy = QX11Info::display();
    Atom atom = XInternAtom(dpy, "_KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION", False);

    if (enable) {
        QVector<QRect> rects = region.rects();
        QVector<quint32> data;
        for (int i = 0; i < rects.count(); i++) {
            const QRect r = rects[i];
            data << r.x() << r.y() << r.width() << r.height();
        }

        XChangeProperty(dpy, window, atom, XA_CARDINAL, 32, PropModeReplace,
                        reinterpret_cast<const unsigned char *>(data.constData()), data.size());
    } else {
        XDeleteProperty(dpy, window, atom);
    }
}
#endif

And then you can activate the blur on the caller widget with:

    kde4EnableBlurBehindWindow(winId(), true);

You could add the back blur to your application too, however I advise you that the interface is not standardized, so don’t blame either me or the kwin authors if something changes. Here is another picture, because everybody loves them 😉

And now, as a side note, a picture from my new work place: the beautiful city of San Diego, blessed by the sun and by a ton of great programmers that by some chance happen to be co-workers of me 😉 With all the blue sky and long days, I can’t imagine a more inspiring place for making new blog posts and code experiments!

Notes:
[1] obviously the name is completely made up 😉
[2] Italian word meaning “teacher” as in school or life teacher

As promised, here is a list of some KDE ideas that the people left in my previous post, along as mine. They’re available for free, so feel free to pick one and make it yours 😉 As a side note, I’m making a KDE Prediction for 2010: KDM will receive lots of love! You can see that the stars are aligning. In fact I’m going to split this post into 2 ideas scenarios to reflect that.

KDM Ideas

1. QML in KDM
   This is all about animations, user interaction and eye candy. See this for example.
2. Plasma in KDM
   This is about consistence and configurability.
3. Webcam Login (face recognition) in KDM
   Show your face (or Mona Lisa‘s one) and you’re in! No password typing needed. Integrating with the pam-face-authentication may be the smart way to go.
4. Fingerprint Login in KDM
   This is KDE’s most requested feature… you can’t be wrong implementing it 😉

KDE Ideas

1. Unified webcam library
   Webcam’s are being utilized a lot lately: they’re cheap, widespread, and they’re working good under Linux. Projects come out with webcam support, like Fotowall, Kamoso, Kopete and there are efforts to get it working in Phonon.
   Note that a camera is a source of video, images but also can be used for authentication and may even be used for user input – can you imagine manipulating stuff with your fingers? Note that webcams must usually be read in single instance, so the approach here might be 1 Qt-Only userspace daemon supporting multiple connections.
2. Unified Theme Manager
   One theme manager to rule them all: styles, colors, plasma theme, windeco & all. Of course the themes must be packed and shared in a binary-compatible manner with any other KDE system (yes, the challenges are there.. 😉
3. Unified Configuration Panel
   Making systemsettings really the one and only configuration tool and provide backends to the distributions for adding/changing modules so KDE systems will have the same feeling for configuring the system. Some modules like ‘partition disk’, ‘edit boot menu’ and ‘manage startup programs’ (daemons) should be added and left to the distribution for implementation – I think they will. Note that current systemsettings lets you configure the joystick even if you don’t have one (!).
4. KWIN: draggable windows
   And for windows I mean (actually J. Janz means) the whole non-interactive panel. Blank space as well as inactive labels should be draggable. From the user POV there is no window-deco + window contents. It’s a panel, let’s use it, move it, resize it, context-menu-it as a whole.
5. Raytraced UI
   I’ll blog more about this, but this is a little thing I’d really like to do but I don’t know if I will find time to do that. Do you think that iPhone gui is cool? Raytrace the .ui high-level gui definition format and you’ll get something better. Glassy too. Mail me if you want to know more about this 😉

Conclusion

I’m sorry I missed some interesting suggestions but I don’t have space here to detail them; just look to my previous blog entry’s comments to find more about BasKet note pads integration into Plasma, file browsing enhancements (context dependent actions, menus, warnings and kparts) qt4 gui for vi, etc.

As someone pointed out there is quite a bit of overlap and dispersion between the ways to collect ideas. I can count:

• KDE Bugzilla’s wishlist
• KDE Forum’s brainstorm
• distribution specific bug trackers
• blog posts (ehm….:-)
• GSOC ideas
• kde-look’s brainstorm
• developers mailing lists
• other bugtrackers
• techbase or userbase
• direct mails and irc chats

Directing users to provide their feedback in a low-dispersive, constructive, modern, layered (from generic directions to specific actions) and focused way is probably one of the challenges that should be added to Aaron’s list for 2010.

You often think “this KDE idea of mine would kick ass” but then you don’t have time to implement it and finally you forget about it? Welcome to the club!

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! 😉

The KDE login Manager

The login manager is the “insert password” dialog that gets in the way when you want to use your computer. Of course you may not be the only user of the machine, so it’s somewhat needed when you share the seat. Some facts:

Kdm Top to Bottom

Qml to the rescue!

What if we throw away (or keep for “retro-compatibility”) the classic and themer frontends and just add a frontend using QML? This is the name of the language of the Qt Declarative module, that has just seen the light and will be merged into Qt for the 4.7 release.

Imagine this:

• theme creators will have 100X or more expressive power: make snow! login via a tetris puzzle! bounce my webcam picture!
• there will be animated themes (for login, user change, logout, etc..) or simple ones for more ‘classic’ kind of people
• kdm only needs to add a couple of bindings to the qml runtime, like functions for logging in and shutting down / suspend the system
• there is no need for compiled binaries, packages will be interpreted by the qml runtime – finally a painless get-hot-new-stuff (compared to plasma widgets, at least).

Conclusion

This is one of the hottest topics of the moment: Multi-Touch (see the trends here). Every review of the just released Qt 4.6 mentions the Touch-and-Gestures framework and KDE is getting ready to use the technology — still it doesn’t work on X11 (yet).

MultiTouch can be Fun !

I couldn’t resist, so for 99€ (120$) I bought a Bamboo Fun Pen & Touclh tablet. I find this really affordable, since you get: A. the precision of a graphics tablet (with 1024 pressure levels, back eraser, etc..) and B. a real 2-Pointers input device!

I tried the tablet on vista, with the latest drivers and the bundled applications bot I got disappointed because:
1. the scroll gesture is remapped to the mouse wheel.. so you lose all the ‘analog’ fun and it feels unconfortable.
2. the zoom gesture is remapped to CTRL+wheel, awkward fixed-steps again.
3. the rotate gesture is not supported by any app even the bundled ones i tried.

In the end I thought this was not “multi-touch”, but some silly gesture-detection broken hardware. I was wrong.

Linux to the rescue

Step 1. After loading the wacom.ko module (updated with this patch) the Linux kernel prints out stuff like this:

[default   ] data: 02 00  00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00
[finger 1  ] data: 02 00  7d 80 fe 00 8a  80 fc 00 87  00 00 00 00 00  81 11 00 00
[finger 1+2] data: 02 00  ae 80 b6 00 72  81 08 00 70  87 81 5b 00 72  81 21 00 00
[finger   2] data: 02 00  00 00 00 00 00  81 59 00 b4  6d 81 59 00 ba  80 11 00 00

Can you see it ? This is a 2-finger device! 🙂

Step 2. The Kernel understands the data and splits it into 2 input devices that Udev maps to /dev/input/wacom and /dev/input/wacom-touch. From here you can read higher level information for each finger such as the decoded position, pressure, click type (tap, doubletab), and more.

I WANT QTouchEvents AND QGestures !!

I do too 😀 And I wanted to hack something about that. But I stopped here:

We get the input from evdev and the Application needs QTouchEvents and QGestures, so the easy way would be to hack up a touchpoint feeder to the Qt framework that directly reads from evdev (evdev -> qt). This would work fine for 1 application, but what about two? And what about moving the X cursor too? I think evdev->Xdriver->XInput2->qt is the solution, but we must be sure that no valuable information is lost in the chain, that the event filtering is done in the right place and obviously, that the X driver does a good job. Unfortunately xf86-input-wacom (X input driver for wacom’s kernel driver) doesn’t support my Bamboo Fun Touch & Pen yet and moreover I don’t see MPX support in the sources, so I’m wondering how far away is the Qt multi-touch backend from seeing the light.

Conclusion

I don’t know which way the multi-touch will happen on linux, but I know for sure that we want to play with gestures and we want it soon 😀

For more information:

• Peter Hutterer’s blog. Peter is the MPX (Multi Pointer X) author and plays a big role in the X.org community.
• X Input Extension 2.0 features.
• The Linux Wacom project. A community-driven effort to develop kernel and X drivers.

note for planetkde readers: check the original article to see the video!

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!!
   [youtube width=”420″ height=”220″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSd9v5xHWa4[/youtube]
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 😉

Seven days after the release of the Tech Preview 1, we released the latest stable Windows build of Fotowall [1] that was based on Qt 4.6. Somebody could argue that this is a bit imprudent. We did that because the benefits of the 4.6 release are worth the risk of the move!

Indirect Benefits, or ‘what you get for free’

• Improved quality and better speed in the OpenGL QPainter
• Better speed in the GraphicsView framework

Direct Benefits

• Animation Framework: this simply r0cks! I don’t know about the whole Kinetic stuff, I just mean the ability to create simple property animations.
  I don’t have a video to show you but just take a look at the Fotowall’s Top-Bar, the tabs appear and disappear with a nice and smooth grow-shrink animation, that make the program look soo 2009-ish! finally!
• QNetworkReply::isFinished(): thanks to this method I could implement a smart time-saver: when the user starts to drag a flickr picture, Fotowall starts downloading it. It can happen that, upon drop, the content has already been completely downloaded (so it can be placed in the canvas) or partially downloaded (so the used only needs to wait for the missing percent)

Drawbacks

• There are some graphics glitches when animating the opacity property of a QGaphicsProxyWidget (in OpenGL)
• Even by setting the QGraphicsItem::ItemSendsGeometryChanges flag, the previous behavior is not perfectly restored (we used itemChange, and the new behavior doesn’t allow Fotowall’s mirrors to sync properly to the objects)

Movie Time!

I’ve tried hard to record a screencast about the Cuteness & Performance of Qt 4.6, but in the end I had to use my camera.

[youtube width=”500″ height=”305″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVzzF_ft7uc[/youtube]

Thanks Nokia for this great release! 😉

[1] Fotowall is a creative program to mix local and online graphics content and build original work.

Fotowall 0.8.2 has just been released and we’re already getting some great feedback 😉

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.

I’ve moved my blog here and I’m building my own site starting from Fotowall.
I feel like home here 😉

Today Fotowall reached the 100’000 downloads mark! It’s a HUGE result, and it’s even more incredible if you consider that we have no homepage, no advertising other than word-of-mouth and those are the downloads of the XP/Vista release only (we have the linux and mac releases too)!
If you haven’t downloaded the latest release, do it now! 😉

To celebrate this result, here is a short teaser for the upcoming version (that will be out in one week):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lggxIIQh7-U]

A big thank you to the team: Arnaud Tanguy, Alessandro Portale, Andreas Brech, Georges Dubus, and translators Martin Zimmermann and Marcio Moraes.

Note for planetqt readers: the title should be ‘Quax 4 – a tale of porting’

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 😉

Fotowall 0.7.1 has been released today! Get it while it’s hot 😉

New features in Fotowall 0.7. In the top left area you can see the web image selector.

With this release Fotowall integrates with the deep web. You can now search the network with the embedded flickr search pane and add the images to the canvas. This opens up an infinite can of content, all available for your pleasure ;-).

Other relevant features include:

• support for Qt 4.6 (brings animations and transparencies)
• usability fixes (rubberband selection, deletion, etc..)
• cleaner design (new icons, loadable frames, better property dialogs)
• italian, french and german translation
• check for updates and web links

Don’t hesitate to ask for missing features and always remember that you can rotate pictures by dragging corners with the right mouse button 😉

Enjoy your Fotowall!! 😀

Since so many of people are asking for the Vista or XP BioCheat, here it is: http://biocheat.googlecode.com/files/Biocheat 0.9.6.exe.

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 😉

Hello everyone, my blog has just been aggregated into planet KDE.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a long time KDE user (since 2.2), I worked on several KDE projects like okular, kdm, amarok, konqueror, as well as releasing other software like Fotowall and other stuff on various repositories.

This planet is the collector of many of my favorite blogs and it’s an honor for me to be here.

See you soon (with some developer tool hacks…stay tuned) ! 😉

Se avete un blog, già conoscete la soddisfazione che si prova analizzando le statistiche.. 😉 Si può determinare la risposta all’impulso, vedere da dove viene e dove va la gente,  capire quali chiavi di ricerca siano state usate per giungere al tuo blog.

L’algoritmo usato da google non è noto ma la perversione di certe persone è ben evidente, infatti è arrivato su questo blog ANCHE chi ha googlato:

1. enrico ross m31 – (e questo tipo lo conosco pure! (D.E. ndr))
2. fattispazio – (levati da li!)
3. produttori di croissant – (cerca “pasticcerie”)
4. design soggiorno – (io so disegnare solo caprette e conigli, vuoi?)
5. meccanismi a catena – (cerca “Wanna Marchi”)
6. appartamento da figata – (sono vietati dalla legge Merlin..)
7. conservanti alimentari per dolci – (conservanti “alimentari” ??)
8. migrazione farfalle 2009 conegliano – (speriamo non ci devastino il raccolto!)
9. la gioia di tutti – (vedi il 10.)
10. luana la zoccola – ()

In occasione dell’anniversario dell massacro di piazza Tiananmen ricordo questa foto, una delle più significative ed al tempo stesso commoventi del nostro tempo, oltre che vincitrice del World Press Photo nel 1989.

Il protagonista, del quale non si seppe più nulla (tranne qualche speculazione) è divenuto famoso con il nome di “The Unknown Rebel” (da noi tradotto ne “Il Rivoltoso Sconosciuto“) oppure “Tank Man”.

Una delle immagini più forti del nostro tempo.

Su Google immagini sono presenti molte foto, anche in alta risoluzione (nel caso vogliate anche voi stamparne una formato poster, ed appenderla al muro).

Il Foscolo sostiene che il ricordo dei grandi, ispira grandi imprese. E voi cosa vedete in questa immagine?

Hello, it’s me again, back on the cheating bandwagon 😉 Last time we talked about BioCheat, and now we add another piece of the web-automation jigsaw puzzle: AutoGram.

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc0v9UFLGpM&w=480&h=304&rel=0]

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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 :D) — Here is the result: BioCheat 😉

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I7vu4thd7Y&fmt=18&w=480&h=332&rel=0]

The game is in FLASH, so no HTML or DOM tricks, you have to emulate eyes, brains and hands (only 1). Read the rest of this entry »

Hello PlanetQt readers! 😉 Thanks to Ben I’ve just been aggregated here!

I’m Enrico Ros, from Italy, and I share your passion for good design, great code and awesome APIs 😀

Stay tuned… ^_^

L’escalation verso la 1.0 continua con una nuova milestone 😉

Nuove caratteristiche presenti in Fotowall 0.6

Se non vi sono bastate le tonnellate di migliorie della 0.5 ecco che arriva una 0.6 che quasi raddoppia la base di codice e introduce una serie di caratteristiche che danno un taglio professionale senza intaccare la facilità di interazione e la libertà di giocare con Fotowall 😉 E ancora non avete letto nulla… Read the rest of this entry »

Esiste miglior diversivo, per dimenticare l’esclusione del mio progetto dal Google Summer of Code 2009, della recensione dei progetti accettati per KDE? Assolutamente no! 🙂 ed ecco allora la:

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 😉

Oggi ho rilasciato Fotowall 0.5!

Show off dell'elemento Testo di Fotowall 0.5

Tra le migliorie:
– creazione e stampa di CD/DVD (by Tanguy Arnaud)
– elemento Testo (completo di Editor visuale HTML-like 😉 )
– più di 50 fix sull’usabilità!
– effetto GLOW

Puoi scaricare qui i sorgenti se ti piace studiare il codice, oppure scarica direttamente il programma per Windows (2.8MB).

Un rigraziamento SPECIALE all’amico Ilan d’Inca per il supporto, il Beta-Testing e le ideone 😉
Al carissimo Ilan dedico questa release!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGtIqkyqWiY]

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! 😉

Tutti sanno come il battido d’ali di una farfalla ad Hong Kong possa causare un uragano a Conegliano Veneto, ma questa e’ piu’ interessante:

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… ;-))

In three days, on wed 14/1/09, I won’t be an M31 employee anymore.
After 2 years of dedication, addiction, dreams and a lot of fun (thanks to all the lovely people in there, some of the best friends I’ve ever had!), I feel it’s the right time to move on.

Many thanks to all the cool people in there (the ones that make you smile, save your ass, drive you home, drive you mad, drive you crazy, teach you, kiss you, never betray you, and love you) and I wish all the best for M31 (that has been so kind to me during those years).

So.. thank you guys and remember that from 6pm to 9am I’m still a cool friend of you 😉

Enrico

Pochi minuti fa sono state rilasciate le Qt 4.4, evviva!!!!! 🙂

come “cosa me ne frega a me” ?? gentile persona, tu ancora non lo sai ma sta per giungere sul tuo desktop, telefonino, frullatore, rasaerba e silkepil la nuova versione di casa Trolltech che oltre al supremo ben di dio che gia ci offre,
ORA FINALMENTE INCLUDE:
* tanto amore
* effetti acido/armonici squinternanti
* pace & bene per tutti gli elecronic devices del pianeta
* ed un sacco di pornografia 😉

Per maggiori vibrazioni:
* Qt.Nokia.Com
* What’s new in Qt 4.4?
* oppure scaricatevi il video delle nuove sciccoserie

As many people requested, now Fotowall has become really Open Source (GPLv2) and is publicly hosted on the net!!

Its new home is http://www.enricoros.com/opensource/fotowall, and for celebration 0.21 was released, with a new Icon, WinXP+ binary file and the full-res version of tutorial video I put on YouTube.

Suggestions are more than appreciated,
Thank you all for your support and drive 😉

L’ultimo rintocco dell’orologio a mezzanotte è stato il primo battito del cuore per quel neonato che in tantissimi stavamo aspettando, quell’ultimo pupillo di casa KDE che è appena nato ma già promette benissimo!

Da oggi, 11 gennaio, KDE 4.0.0 è una realtà che possiamo usare sui nostri desktop, un tassello importante che porta nuove tecnologie alla porta di tutti, senza distinzioni. Multipiattaforma, integrato, curato nell’aspetto, nei suoni, nell’interazione con l’utente, e fonte di ispirazione per me e, mi auguro, per i miei compagni di ventura in M31.

Voltiamo pagina nei nostri desktop. Il nuovo inchiostro lo metteremo noi.

– Be Free.

Scaricalo in formato 1280×800

update: this article is really outdated, we have a website now!
see the new cool stuff @ www.enricoros.com/opensource/fotowall 😎

You always wanted to create quick graphics composition from a bunch of photos you have.. and now your dream came true! With Fotowall you can drag some pictures in the canvas, place them as you like, put a title on them, change the colors and the gradients the way you like and finally render a poster-sized graphical composition of them!

Take a look a this quick video tour. In less than 2 minutes you will see the whole process, from installation to the rendering of a wallpaper.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmzMY0mfRnc]

You can find the source code on the website. The program runs on every Linux or Windows (XP, Vista) out there! (So even Ilan will be able to do a “two hands saw” in his awesome OS!! :-))

Thanks goes to David Eccher for his suggestions!
You rock man 😉

Update: the source code is included in the Fotowall project. The files you’re looking for are the ColorPickerItem ones.

Say you’re writing an application and you want to let the user to change the color of an item; what will you do?

The standard approach is to popup a color dialog with the standard HSV selector and all the sliders and values and buttons and confusion. Another approach is to pop down a combobox with a selection of default colors where the user won’t find the colour she is looking for (unless it’s RED, of course :-)).
Both approaches need you to get shocked by another window appearing right in front of you, so you loose the context and move the mouse far away from where it was.

Let’s take a look at this new approach:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcLwLQQGiks]

The 2d (yet perspective transformed) dialog smoothly fades in when hovering the color and your favorite hue is just 1 or 2 clicks apart!

Update: l’appartamento è stato assegnato. Auguriamo buona fortuna a tutti quelli che sono ancora alla ricerca!! 😉

Ti offriamo una bellissima doppia, in un appartamento davvero unico, vedere per credere 😉
Per informazioni, clicca sulla pagina “appartamento”, qui sopra.

L’hai tenuta in salvo per quest’occasione, te la immagini calda fragrante friabile dolce ripiena di una cosa gialla piena di conservanti che le donano un gusto così irresistibile …!

Ma per assaporarla al meglio:
– la metti nel microonde con il timer settato su minuti 7
– inizi a contare fino al 20
– suona il telefono e tu rispondi
– durante la telefonata hai il senso che ti stai dimenticando qualcosa
– ed allora vai in cucina per dare da mangiare al gatto

Beh, quel giorno ti levi una curiosità:

cosa succede se lasci 7’20” una brioche nel microonde..

Sei invidioso della bellezza di questo blog, eh ?