Life of a Developer

>There has been quite alot of activity in the Qt 4 IDEs arena lately. QIde has been renamed to QDevelop, Cobras has been released and QDev has been discontinued, but is followed by Edyuk.

Before I continue I would like to emphasis the cross platform aspect of the IDEs. To me, this means being available for atleast X11/Linux/gcc and Windows/mingw. It also means not being a KDE application that can be compiled for Windows + Mac – the aim here is to support Qt development on Qt’s platform. Not moving KDE to new platforms.

QDev/Edyuk is, to my knowledge, the oldest project of the three. The last QDev release dates back to February 2006 while Edyuk has blog entries dating to October 2006. The project was started by FullMetalcoder of QtCentre, and he still maintains it. The pcroject seems somewhat incomplete, but has interesting features such as an integrated version of Designer.

QDevelop is developed by Jean-Luc Biord of qtfr.org. The project was first released in June 2006 and has already a working plug-in system, a class explorer, code completion, project management and debugging support. It uses ctags, gdb and Qt 4 and can be run on Windows and Linux. The project does not integrate Designer, but invokes it as an external application.

Cobras was released just yesterday by Piotr Pszczolkowski. From the projects homepage is looks as if is it is a simple code editor that can handle qmake’s pro-files and can build n’ run the resulting binaries. The class explorer does not seem to be working, but the application seems stable enough. I could not find a way to edit the actual pro-file, but that might just be me. There are no notion about working cross platform on the site but I can successfully run it on Windows.

To summarize my impressions, QDevelop seems the most mature while Edyuk has some interesting features (such as integrating Designer). Cobras currently seems to be a pro-file aware text editor with integrated compilation. My hope for the future is for more cooperation. Having lots of paralell projects is a normal way to try architectures, but hopefully the developers can agree on one platform and focus their efforts there.

Update! Nicolas kindly pointed me to the new site of Qt4DS, now known as MonkeyStudio. This is one of the oldest Qt 4 IDE projects (competing with Edyuk) and seems quite mature. It has project management, code completion as well as translations. When it comes to translations it has got a really interesting approach and seems to be supporting this better than any of the other alternatives.

>I have just been on my first paid Qt assignment. I visited a Norwegian company in Horten and helped them for three days. Thanks alot Lappen and Mohal at Trolltech who gave me the chance to try my abilities in a professional project!

>Witold blogged that he has published a new version of his Chart classes for Qt 4. They are based around the Interview framework and look really promissing. He has been doing some really interesting things with Qt 4’s support for MVC programming – just look at his OpenGL + MVC articles. It looks very interesting to me. For those of you not familiar with Witold, he is one of the leading members of QtCentre.org – and I would love to see him added to PlanetKDE.

The second new is that my RSS reader – Google Reader – has been updated. The interface is still a bit hard to get used to for me, but it looks like a change to the better. The primary reason for me to use Google Reader is that it allows me to check all my feeds from my mobile phone – a great feature for bored geeks :-)

>I have blogged about getting a new laptop, an Acer Travelmate 8204. I’m happy with it this far and have finally gotten around to actually installing Linux on it. The contestants where Suse and Kubuntu. Suse’s installer failed to boot, so Kubuntu won the trust on walk over.

When trying the Kubuntu live CD I ran into the issue of screen resolutions – my odd widescreen could not be selected. Some of you (thanks!) wrote and told me about the 855resolution and 915resolution packages – and reading instructions for them intimidated me. Thus, I decided to first attempt to get the ATI drivers going. To do that, I used the following lines from the Ogre Wiki (thanks!):

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
echo fglrx | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
sudo sed -i -e 's/"vesa"/"fglrx"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Press alt-backspace

The parts in italics where changed by me to get things working – and to save a reboot. Now all I have to do is to install svn, Qt 4 and QtopiaCore and I’m happy for tonight.

>Issue 18 of Qt Quarterly was just released on-line. I would just like to recommend my article on mouse gestures – it was fun developing the code and fun writing the text.

>Got home from Prague today at 3:00 AM. Tired, exhausted and soon over-worked. Today I’ve spent a good three hours on the phone and written two quotations. We’ll see what we catch at the end :-)

>Since this year’s result is over the expectations in the budget I’m going to Prague. Will be a nice weekend!

>A couple of years ago my girlfriend (now wife) complained about me having christmas decorations up close to the easter holidays. To solve this problem I designed a pair of generic decorations.

It is (supposed to be) santa and Rudolph (the reindeer) – both in beautiful, easter compatible, yellow.

>During the summer vacation this year some friends of mine and myself built a garage. I planned to have it done in one week, but had to spend around five weeks getting the exteriour done. Now, my wife has painted two siluettes on the walls. First up was a Volvo Amazon, my wife’s dream car.

On the other side of the garage I originally planned for a BMW 850, but the profile is a bit too dull – much due to the aerodynamic properties of the car. Instead, I went for a F1 race car.

All that is left now is shelves, a workbench and cleaning.

>Sweden will have a new leadership! This will mean lower taxation on work, better education and – in due time – no taxation for owning houses. Great news IMHO.

A little bonus for some of us is that prime minister Goran will leave the political scene all together. No loss for Sweden there.