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.