More about categories

As you already know, this years edition of the QtCentre Programming Contest, we will judge applications in a given range of categories. This time I will discuss the education and project management categories.

For us at QtCentre, the education category was accepted without discussion. The need and usefulness for the entire Qt community of having Qt and Qt-based tools in the education field is enormous. Just imagine having started with Qt or a competing technology - what would you pick for your first real world project?

Project management was another easy pick. There is a lack of easy to use project management applications out there. This gives room for new applications as well as innovation - something that we value and enjoy.

History Meme

This seems to be some sort of trend at Planet GNOME.

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
96 ls
89 cd
78 make
33 rm
23 wget
22 grep
19 mv
16 sudo
16 kate
15 tar

What does it tell you? I tend to move about and look for files, make stuff, remove files, download things, search for strings using grep (preferably followed by some sed magic and xargs to open kate with the relevant files). Finally, I edit using Kate and build daily deliveries using tar.

Rules Changes and Categories

I thought I'd continue writing about the QtCentre Programming Contest 2008. First up, a rule change: paragraph 7 has been modified to include KDE 4.1.x for the Plasmoid contestants per request. Next, out thoughts on the categories, starting with collaboration.

We want to see collaboration applications, that is, applications that let users interact, create things together and cooperate. Why is this interesting? The world is a more and more interconnected place. While this is a challenge, it is also a place of opportunity, and an area where Qt offers a range of classes that helps you has a developer to be creative. These factors makes us believe that this is a category that can produce great results, so register your entry today!

QtCentre Programming Contest 2008

One of the better parts of being a member of the QtCentre administration team is that you get the opportunity to run the annual programming contest. In the first stage, we discussed how to pitch it this year. Last year we tried to divide the entries between developer apps, end user apps, libs, etc. This year we 're trying something different. The categories this year are: collaboration, education, project management, automation, demo, plasmoid and newcomer. If you are curious about the details, look no futher than here. I will discuss our thoughts when choosing these categories later on.

In the previous days we reached the next stage of the preparations. I got to talk to lots of interesting sponsors and partners. The nice thing to notice the all the positive feedback that we got. This year, the sponsors making the contest possible are: Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Integrated Computer Solutions Inc., Trolltech ASA, BitRock, Thorsen Consulting, Apress and basysKom. (Yes Apress are donating some copies of my book, the Foundations of Qt Development).

Now, I'm eager for one of the best stages of helping out with the contest - seeing the contestants and trying them out.

Pole pole pole pole pole pole...

Yes - I do suck at image editing - but Kubica did it - POLE!

SpeedCrunch 0.10

Earlier this week, SpeedCrunch 0.10 was released. Helder and all the other contributors have made a great job to make a good application even better. There are lots of new features, but some of my favorites are:

- The maths book, look up any formula and click it. Viola! It appears in your expression entry field.
- Automatic generation of a high contrast palette (this was alot of work for Helder). And it works like a charm.
- A reorganized, fresher looking user interface.

My humble contributions are the Swedish translation and a Windows installer. SC is available on all Qt-supported platforms, so there is no excuse for not using it. In fact, it is a really good example of a Qt project that is fully portable between all the supported platforms being built with CMake.