ubiQt

Since coming back from Qt Developer Days 2010 in San Francisco (more precisely in Burlingame, near SF airport), one thought really bothered my mind: "when will Qt become ubiquitous?".

Now, if you are active in the KDE and Qt community, this seems like a strange question. But ubiquitous means omnipresence, in particular for the whole developer community.

Flash back to ages ago. You wrote a cool Python script (could be also in Ruby, or Lua, pick your battle) to do FooBar, everyone you know was impressed, you wanted to share the love with the world and then some fellow hacker noticed, "That's cool, man. But I don't want to install Python, can you give me the executable?". What would you think?

The situation is similar with Qt these days. You write a nice Qt-based utility, running on different platforms, somebody spots it and the first thing he asks is "Where is the binary?"; never mind he has just grabbed and installed hundreds MB worth of utilities.

These days, when you are developing some software, the first thing you'd do on a fresh machine is to download and install a gazillion tools (Xcode with iOS SDK weighs around 3.8 GB). With the initiative towards open governance, I hope Nokia and others will be able to steward Qt in that direction: being included in the de-facto standard of development tool sets. The most interesting challenge is to overcome the doubt, "Why do I need to install some Nokia SDK to use your cool app?".

Qt Developer Days, Bay Area Mobile meetup

We heard that Munich Qt Developer Days was an awesome event, which is why I look forward to the San Francisco Qt Developer Days, which will be held November 1-3.

Now, if you are from outside US, drop me an email in case you fancy some quality tea/coffee time. Even better, on the next day (November 4), Sencha will host the first Meet the Sencha Team, the first Bay Area Mobile meetup. Our team will give an overview of Sencha and the mobile technologies we are developing. RSVP and drop by!

san francisco

I have been in Qt Developer Days twice, in the previous two years. This year I am still going there, but only the San Francisco event, for the first time as a participant (as opposed to as a speaker). I'll bring other new engineers at Sencha, too.

Since I live in the Bay Area these days, feel free to email me should you want to meet for coffee/lunch/dinner. See you there!

bye munich (and D2)

After kickstarted on Tuesday, Qt Developer Days 2009 Munich has ended. Some of us, the Trolls, are already back in Oslo, recovering from the intense adrenalin kicks within the last 72 hours (or more). The extra surprise was to experience the first snow in Munich (and this is still mid October!). Most must recharge pretty fast, considering the San Francisco version of the event is in about two weeks time.

There already a bunch of articles covering the event which show up in some sites, Aron has most of them in his wrap-up blog entry. More links are and will be available via qtbynokia twitter. Fancy some pictures instead? Search for qtdd09 tag on Flickr and enjoy them!

As for me, I am glad that this is finally over. It's all about people: it was exciting to meet old friends and make new ones. In addition, my Special FX with Graphics View talk was well received (the room was jam-packed), I got some very interesting feedback and questions to follow-up. The other talk, Copy Your Favourite Nokia App with Qt, was a bit quiet (the typical problem of all presentations in the afternoon of the last day) but still, it was as interactive as it could be.

This mini wrap-up is not complete without food photos. While we were in Munich, we ventured some different possibilities for dinner. Let me just show you two of them: Low-carb Seafood and Biryani:

Qt Developer Days 2009 - Live

Like I mentioned before, now I am in Munich for Qt Developer Days 2009. The training sessions started yesterday already, the plenary was initiated this morning as we had the keynotes from Sebastian, Lars, Walter, and Matthias. We are now in the middle of lunch break, the technical track will start very soon.

This is the biggest Qt Developer Days so far, we have over 650 participants (last year it was only around 400). Can you imagine now what happens during the lunch break? Hint: the queue. As a nice touch, we even show a coffee machine running Qt:

I will have two talks tomorrow (Day 2) for the Innovate track: Special FX with Graphics View and Copy Your Favourite Nokia App with Qt. See you there!

2009 developer days

Just like last year, this fall we will have another Qt Developer Days. Europeans might want to visit Munich, Americans are better served with San Francisco.

Will I go there? Well, unless there is something wrong, yes I will. Note that a little information about the sessions is already available. I leave it as an exercise to the reader, which talks in the Innovate track I will hold :)

graphics dojo in 2008: a wrap-up

If you show some friends an ancient trick to multiply two numbers in your head within seconds, typically you would either get a dismissal ("Fast? A calculator or Google is faster!") or an excitement ("How useful!"). Each response is justified. In our daily activities, we seldom face the situation that force us to only multiply two numbers and right at that moment you don't have a calculator (or Google) at your disposal. However, knowing such an art can help you to improve your overall math skill, cast away the unnecessary fear, build your passion for math, and makes you ready for the next level. As Louis Pasteur once expressed, "In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind".

The same goes for some of the graphics examples I have written for that Labs Graphics Dojo corner, and also what I have shown in my Developer Days talk. The most common comment is "Blazing-fast? Just use OpenGL!" That is very true, and I could not agree more. However, googling for 27*31, which gives the answer one second faster than my brain, will not make me fall in love with math. The concern of the talk was more about the tricks and the passion behind them. It could be only me, but I feel that developers start to lose passion for graphics, even though they have to deal with lots of user interface stuff. We are practical enough already, we know when to use Google or when to do it ourselves, but we can not afford to let the passion goes away. After all, Zack started it under the name Graphics Dojo not e.g. Graphics Oracle, as it is merely a training place rather than a collection of solutions.

Although it is implicitly stated, if I were Louis Pasteur, I would have gone further and said "chance favors the prepared and passionate mind".

That is, 2008 is coming to its end. Around mid 2008 Samuel and I agreed to resurrect our beloved Graphics Dojo corner. I hope our attempt did not fail (miserably), in particular since I was new to this wonderful world of graphics.

Squeezing a couple minutes here and there, making the best out of rainy weekends, firing vim to code during some sleepless nights (instead of browsing the web aimlessly), redirecting my passion to graphics between fixing WebKit bugs, here is a list of biweekly Dojo examples that I managed to pull off this half-year:

• Genie effect, after the similar one made popular in Mac OS X.
• Flick charm to make any scroll area flickable.
• Custom web view with panning support, useful for touch device.
• Image colorizer using painter composition.
• A simple image viewer with support for remote URL drag-and-drop.
• Visual Google, where your search result is accompanied by the thumbnail previews of the hits.
• Small tool called websnap, given a web page it will create the preview.
• Parallax sliding effect for, say, a home screen in a mobile platform (phone, portable device, you name it).
• SVG rasterizer using WebKit as the rendering back end.
• Quake-like underwater effect. Simple old school trick.
• HSV pie with QImage pixel manipulation.
• Dreamy feeling by bloom effect, as some sort of composition example.

And while you are there, check out examples written by my fellow Trolls:

• WolfenQt, a Qt version of Wolfenstein 3-D along with embedded Qt widgets.
• Bloom filter as an example of the new pixmap filter feature.
• Translucent widget, for X11.
• Text zooming through painter scaling.
• Radial blur like in the nineties.
• Mix widgets and Graphics View to have widget acceleration with OpenGL.

Happy New Year!

Tinting through composition

Another example that I showed in Developer Days was an alternative way to tint an image. Suppose you want to have a little feedback to the user when s/he puts the mouse on an icon, what you can do is to colorize the icon while the cursor is still on top of it. Changing the overall tone of the color of an image can be done in different ways. One obvious way is to convert every pixels from RGB to HSV, perform some manipulations on the hue and perhaps also saturation, then convert back the result to RGB, which will be the final color of those pixels. A rather different and less correct approach (though the result is still visually good) is to convert the image to grayscale and then overdraw a big rectangle with certain composition modes, check out my latest entry on Qt Labs Blogs exactly on that matter: Colorize an image via painter composition.

The included example can also take an image from the web, e.g. drag and drop from Flickr. In case you want to know the trick and/or look for a simple example of QNetworkAccessManager, then follow the simpler code for image viewer with support for remote URL.

visual google

Remember the tradition that I started in Redwood City? Well, the parallax sliding demo was for the graphics talk. For my QtWebKit presentation, the challenge was different. Basically it boils down to a visual version of Google Search. Instead only getting the hits and some text snippet, you should also get the web snapshot of the hits. There are apparently browser extensions out there which implement this kind of functionality.

Before going further, let us see first how we can get a preview of any web page. With QtWebKit, it is as easy as creating a QWebPage and using it to render the content to a painter that operates on an image. Check out websnap example, if you think this is not easy enough. Running websnap to several popular web sites gives the following:

Coming back to visual search. So while rehearsing my talk in the night before, I created the search and snap demo. What is presented as the next dojo example is however a slightly better version (afterall, I have more than just one night to polish it), as I added some text snippet to make it more attractive. The result is as follows, the code can be checkout from the usual graphics corner. As you can see, a third of the code is just reusing the WebSnap class.

A screencast is worth a thousand screenshots. Thus, for your pleasure, check the following 1-minute video, too. Or view it on blip.tv (high quality), YouTube (low quality, more bandwidth-friendly), or download the Ogg Theora file (3.3 MB).

So who is going to turn it into a plasmoid?

Android-like parallax sliding

At Redwood City Qt Developer Days (also where, BTW, a bunch of KDE geeks made a funny group photo), I started a tradition: throw an idea for a demo and I will implement it for the talk. The challenge for my graphics talk was the subtle effect in the Android's home screen. We saw T-Mobile G1 the night before and recalled again the good old games in the eighties. So the next morning I waked up earlier both to rehearse my talk (again) and to implement this parallax sliding. It turned out to be almost trivial to implement (200 lines of code) so just check it out!

For the lazy, do enjoy the screen capture below, or see also the screencast on YouTube or blip.tv or just grab the Ogg Theora video (4.2 MB).

Happy parallaxing!

KDE + Qt

For details, check out Jason's post on KDE/Qt California People Sightings.

bye, Munich. see you in US!

I am back in Oslo for a short rest before flying again to US. Of course, I am still having symptoms of sleep deprivation, in the last 5 days in Munich I managed to accumulate only 19 hours of sleep. Though the schedule was tight, I could squeeze few hours of sight-seeing, among others to visit Castle Neuschwanstein and Viktualienmarkt.

At least in my opinion, Qt Developer Days 2008 in Munich was a success. Our fellow Trolls who organized this event did a great job. We announced a fresh Qt IDE called Greenhouse and also the first Pimp My Widgets contest (the pimp himself was there on-stage), ate a piece of the 5-years DevDays cake, had a wonderful dinner with the partners and customers, and of course enjoyed a lot of talks and discussions with them as well.

I was quite content with my technical talks: QtWebKit: Present and Future and Beautiful and Blazing-Fast Graphics with Qt. The room was jam-packed for both of them. Lots of questions in the QA session, even more after the talks.

In about 10 days I will be in Redwood City for US Qt Developer Days 2008. Looks like I will be in around in San Francisco even from the weekend before. In addition, next week I will be in Boston for another business trip. Thus, if you are around and want to have a snack or a chat, just mail me at ariya.hidayat@gmail.com!

Pimp My Widgets

You think you are good? Why don't you try to win a Segway or some N810. Head straight to:

http://trolltech.com/pimpmywidgets!

Update: our pimp announced the contest right after dinner here at DevDays 2008:

magnificent skyline out of my reach

As I mentioned before, few hours more until Qt Developer Days 2008 at Hilton Munich Park. Feel free to contact me at ariya.hidayat@gmail.com if you are around!

/me is getting ready for the flight.