It’s always nice to promote cool things like the work that guys are doing with Qt Kinetic. MoRpHeUz commented my previous post and mentioned that there is ongoing work in Qt Kinetic for animated layouts. They try to release that stuff with Qt 4.7 or 4.8. Check the video above how the animated layout stuff works.
Archive
Tag: “Qt 4.6″My last article of Maemo 6 UI Framework was about the layouts and how they work and are designed. In that article, I criticized a bit the implementation because in my opinion they could have used QStateMachine and Qt Animation Framework combination to make the design simpler. One of my principles is that if I criticize something, I need to be able to provide an alternative solution, but it might not be a better than the orignal one:) I guess there’s no sense review anything if you are not able to provide any feedback and alternative ways to do things. So the result speaks most. Here’s a youtube video running animated layouts on N900.
One of the greatest thing in Qt has always been a sophisticated layout management. There are actually two different layout systems in Qt: a layout management for QWidget based widgets and a layout management for QGraphicsWidget based widgets. This article will focus on the latter one, but the basic idea in both layout management systems is similar – the application developer doesn’t need to hardcode widget’s size and position in relative its parent, all this is done automatically by the Qt. Qt also tries to fill in all the available space so for example when resizing the application window, the layout always fills the free space (I know this can be prevented also). At this point if you are not familiar of Qt’s layout management it is worth to spend some time with reading documentation from here.
I have an idea that my blog should also introduce interesting projects that I find from the wonderful internet. Because I like Qt, I prefer to introduce Qt projects:) A colleague of mine, Jan Ekholm aka Chakie is one of the real Qt Gurus at least in my opinion. If I remember right, he has used Qt something like 15 years now.
Jan has started a very interesting project called State Machine Editor. At the time of writing this article, the actual software is not ready yet, but at least I can tell you little bit about it. Below you can see the screenshot with a simple state diagram. (Yes, I draw that:) The source code is available from the Gitorious: http://gitorious.org/state-machine-editor.
Screenshot of the State Machine Editor.