Category: Miscellaneous

>See you in München.

>I just received a nice mail from a guy called James S. Gibbons. He tipped me about his collection of programming tips, in particular three articles touching Qt. One on Qt in soft real-time systems, one on Qt, threading and sharing and the last one on data-aware dialogs using Qt. As I love to see Qt writing in the wild, I used these as a starting point for the articles collection for thelins.se/qt.

Personally, I was intrigued by the article on the real-time aspects of Qt. James has spent some time benchmarking some Qt classes to their corresponding STL and VCL (Borland stuff) classes – and Qt proved to be very competitive. Yet another proof of the quality of the Qt product.

Relating to my last blog post on Qt communities, these articles is something that are a Good Thing. Providing the community members with articles (i.e. knowledge) must be one of the pillars of a good community. So all of you writing out there – keep it up. And if you want me to link to your articles, tell me.

Also on community issues – I’m going to DevDays in München. Hope to see you there!

>Finding the Community

I got some nice reactions to my last blog entry about creating connections between Qt developers. There are so many projects out there, and some seems to get lost in the noice. This is only natural, and hopefully, the best projects are the one that gets noticed. The problem that I seem to run into from time to time is that the Qt community is divided into a set of groups that are (partly) unaware of each other. So, in order to build a bigger, stronger, more lively community we must bring these groups together. How? That is, indeed, the question.

Before we can start “uniting” groups we need to know what we want to do. In my opinion, the goal isn’t necessarily to join the groups into one super group. Rather, the goal is to make the groups aware of each other and their different projects, resources and solutions. How? That, again, is the question.

As I don’t have a clear answer to the questions that arise, I want to show a few resources to all of you. I will most likely miss a few (or a lot). In that case – use the commenting feature or mail me (e8johan, using gmail).

• QtCentre’s wiki – a collection of tips, tricks and other Qt-related resources.
• QtNode’s wiki – another collection of Qt-resources.
• A Qt Blog – this is, in my opinion, a great blog because Matt picks up items from many different groups within the Qt community.
• QtApps and QtProp – two collections of Qt applications. The first for open source and the later for proprietary.
• Trolltech’s list of open source projects – overlooked? small? hard to navigate? This list have a potiential to grow.

And then there is my tiny list of resources at thelins.se/qt which I want to grow – if you have anything that you want me to add. Feel free to tell me about it.

By the way…

For those of you wanting to get started with Qt and KDE development, bookpool is having a sale. For example, you can get Foundations of Qt Development with 50% off, leaving you with a cost of 27.25 USD.

>QtCenter‘s programming contest has had a few good effects. For instance, QXML-RPC has been released into the wild. Also, GCF has also been released. I’m sure that both these projects would have been released anyway – hopefully the contest results inspired earlier and better releases. The interest expressed in both these projects, and others, prove that competitions and other events really are needed in the Qt community. They provide additional inspiration, motivation and contacts between developers and that is what drives us all to create better software.

>Jonathan seems to like my book: the dot.

>

> A couple of weeks ago, Helder and B came to visit me in Gothenburg. Helder is the guy currenly maintaining SpeedCrunch and he has been performing miracles – the project now have a good leadership and structure. We visited the archipelago as well as Liseberg, the amusement park. Apparently Helder has no problem with heights – he must think that I’m a chicken as I stayed on the ground when he tried some extra rides (I did go on Balder!).

>The Qt Centre Programming Contest has finally been completed. You can find all the contestants here, and the winning entries here. I’d like to say thanks to all who entered and a big congratulations to all the winners. Five of you will get a copy of Foundations of Qt Development – I hope that you will enjoy it!

>I’m usually not happy about bankruptcies and other bad things happening to companies but these guys had it coming and deserve it.

>Have you written something about Qt? Have you got a library, a widget or a tool that would be useful to other Qt developers? Do you have a Qt/KDE site?

If any of the above fits you – tell me (e8johan, gmail) and I’ll add you to www.thelins.se/qt – an on-line appendix to the Foundations of Qt Development. By the way – when speaking of the book – have you noticed that a sample chapter and all the example source code is available for download.

The site that I mention above is just a start. The first new content that I’ve added is a look at the various cross platform IDEs out there. The only one that I’ve finished writing about is Trolltech’s own integration of Qt and Eclipse. A promising offering.