Category: Miscellaneous

>Recently I’ve been working with Qtopia for Bitsim. The plan is to support acceleration through Qtopia on Linux when using their graphics controller BADGE. For those of you interested in hardware, BADGE is an IP-block that can be implemented in both FPGAs and ASICs. It offers a basic framebuffer as well as acceleration of basic shapes such as lines, rectangles and text (!). It can also be used for blitting and such. You might know it from an apperance at LinuxDevices.

Anyway, the correct work is being made using the BADGER reference board. It offers a 180 MHz ARM9 CPU and an FPGA holding BADGE operating at 100 MHz. These are interconnected using a 60MHz data bus. Not too much power or bandwidth, so it will be interesting to see what kind of performance we can get from it. The screen used is an 800×600 pixels TFT – quite a few pixels per megahertz compared to other reference boards I’ve seen. The BADGE hardware can be tuned to support different bit-depths, but right now I’m working with a 4/4/4/4 configuration (four bits per color and four alpha bits).

The BADGE GPU can be reached through a library and a custom Linux framebuffer driver. The idea is to have Qtopia use this library through a custom QScreen class. I’ll also have to come up with a custom QWSWindowSurface, a QPaintDevice and a QPaintEngine.

>First if all – happy new year to all of you! 2008 will be a great year with lots of exiting Qt and KDE news. The biggest will probably be Qt 4.4 and KDE 4.0 – two milestones.

For my part 2007 was the year when working with Qt became a reality. My book, the Foundations of Qt Development, was printed, I visited DevDays, I started laying out slides for training based on the book, I had the opportunity to work within a Qt project as well as an adviser to a Qtopia project. All in all great fun!

2007 was also a year when I ran out of time. This is a rather nasty experience – finding that you have more to do than you can do in 24h/day. Reaching the conclusion that it isn’t you (or in this case me) but the amount of work is really hard – but having that revelation really helps. For example, I still have not posted any pictures from DevDays here. Luckily, I’ve had the chance to delegate things both workwise and in the community – but it is really though releasing a pet project and letting some one else in, but it is all for the better. In December ’06 I made the decision to step down as maintainer for SpeedCrunch – and during 2007 Helder Correia has really turned up the development pace and revitalized this project. Great work!

So, for 2008, there are lots of exiting news. First of all, our family will have a new member, going from two to three. It will be very exiting. My employer, Bitsim, will start demonstrating Qtopia with our own graphics controller. I will try to run a few Qt training sessions based on my book (interested? – contact me! my personal goal is three sessions next year). I will also try to blow some life into my mouse-gesture-recognition package.

Let’s see what I actually can find time for. Some life-changing events are approaching, so it is really hard to say what the outcome will be – other than exiting and great fun. The sum of all this – I’m convinced 2008 will be a great year!

>Funny thing, how the GCC error messages’ list get updated in bursts. Thanks to Mark for sending me the cannot pass objects of non-POD type ‘struct std::string’ through ‘…’ gem.

>ArsTechnica’s Ryan Paul had a look at the preview release of Qt 4.4. The article is a nice read, but I really must quote the ending paragraph:

“GTK is my toolkit of choice for the vast majority of my Linux desktop application development, so my perspective on Qt is that of an outsider looking in at a very different kind development platform. Despite my limited familiarity with the toolkit, I’m very impressed with the new functionality in Qt 4.4, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the KDE community and other Qt users leverage the features.“

It is really nice to reach such a positive review!

Update! I was informed that calling Ryan “a GTK guy” was taking it too far – anyway – he seems to like Qt 4.4.

>As you might know, I create the Windows installer for SpeedCrunch. The installer is based on Inno Setup, which is a great tool. However, the short-cuts created from the wizard does not specify the WorkingDir parameter. This means that you run into trouble when looking for translations and other external resources. By adding the argument WorkingDir "{app}" to all icons this is resolved.

>Picking such a title for a blog entry means that I need to be on edge. :-)

By not spelling cout properly, Diederik van der Boor was able to get the following gem out of GCC:

invalid operands of types ‘<unresolved overloaded function type>’ and ‘const char [15]’ to binary ‘operator<<’

Quite charming if you ask me :-) The error and solution have been added to my list of GCC errors.

> Or, SnabbKross, as the name would have been if I’d translated that as well. Ariya mentioned a Windows installer. That, and a Swedish translation, was my contribution to the 0.9 release. If you ever wanted to get into F/OSS I can recommend translating. An hour in Linguist is all that it takes.

>I’ve been interviewed by Dr Dobbs on Qt and Qtopia. Listen to it here!

>I just got a mail from Prashanth Udupa informing me that a release candidate of VTK Designer 2 has been made available. I’ve tried VTK Designer a few times in the past months. Despite this, each new version surprises me. This application is really cool, both when looking at the technology and visually. More interesting to fellow Qt developers is that the user interface feels really solid, but also provides a whole bunch of quite advanced widgets.

Just looking at the screenshot above, you will see a professional looking expandable tree to the left, a graphics view showing a bunch of interacting objects in the middle and a the top – like it or not – the newest kind of toolbar as introduced in the last incarnation of Office.

Switching tab in the work area reveals the visually pleasing part – a live VTK rendering. The view can be rotated and turned around – live. Apparently, for those of you with a bigger gadget account than me, it also supports haptic input. This means that you can actually feel and prod at objects in your scene. For those of you interested in more than my basic screens – check out the video.

>This week as been really intense. I visited DevDays 2007. Got a chance to meet lots of interesting people – some of which I’ve known on-line for years, other who where totally new acquaintances to me, and some that I’ve known and met before. I’m really glad that I got the opportunity I’ve to meet them all. All this resulted in a rather large pile of business cards on my desk that I will try to follow up in the next couple of weeks.

I received a lot of praise for my book, which feels great. The Trolls even had a copy in their help-desk :-) . The talks given where great – both the road map and management style talks and the in-depth technical details talk (Bradley even showed his favorite function – sendPostedEvents – in one of his talks). Since there are so many impressions from this event, I will try to collect my thoughts during the weekend and blog more about it next week (with photos included).

On the business side, my colleague Marcus, has been making progress on Bitsim’s Qtopia based demo platform. Soon there will be accelerated Qtopia running on top of a live video stream.

Finally, a quick note. Trolltech has decided to replace their open source software collection to Qt-Apps.org. Hopefully, the result will be a bigger, more lively community site listing Qt applications. When discussing Qt-Apps.org I feel that it is equally important to mention Qt-Prop.org. A site collecting Qt-based proprietary applications. This is a part of the on-line Qt community that would benefit from more common resources and places for exchanging experiences. Funnily enough, quite a lot of the commercial developers I met at DevDays knew about and used QtCentre‘s resources. Great!