A nova versão está disponível para download em qt.nokia.com, em versões pré compiladas para Windows, MacOS e Symbian, além do código fonte (para todas as plataformas). Usuários Linux podem baixar e compilar o fonte ou então instalar usando os procedimentos normais de cada distribuição, tão logo estejam disponíveis os pacotes desta versão.

Entre as novidades dessa versão estão:

• API de Animação (QAnimation)
• Máquina de Estados (QStateMachine)
• Novo layout (QGraphicsAnchorLayout)
• Suporte para a plataforma Symbian, o que permite que o Qt rode em dezenas de milhões de novos aparelhos

A documentação atualizada com todas as novas classes está pronta também, ou pelo Qt Assistant ou online.

Outro fato marcante desta versão é o fato de ser a primeira após a abertura do repositório Git do Qt, e assim marca uma integração cada vez maior com a comunidade. Nesse sentido esperamos que todos usem, testem e mandem opiniões e reports de eventuais bugs, para que as próximas versões sejam cada vez melhores!

Para ilustrar um pouco, um vídeo feito pelo pessoal aqui do openBossa mostrando o 4.6.0 rodando em diversos aparelhos!

Para finalizar, algumas fotos do time do Qt.

Em Oslo

Em Berlin

Em Brisbane

Em Munich

Parabéns pessoal!

Now I’d like to give some overview of how it works and why we’re so excited about it.

To do that I’ll talk about the layouts that already existed in Qt, the Anchor Layout basic usage and finally, the situations that are better handled by the latter. From now on assume I’m talking about the QGraphicsView framework and where you read “widget” or “layout”, understand that I refer to QGraphicsWidgets and QGraphicsLayouts.

Existing QGraphicsLayouts

As of Qt 4.5, the exiting layouts available were the Linear and the Grid layouts. With those, as their names imply, users could have their widgets arranged side-by-side or in a spreadsheet-like fashion, with support for merged cells included.

It was not possible however to lay items out of the screen or overlap them, total or partially. Besides that, some cases would require several layouts to be nested in order to achieve the desired result.

The Anchor Layout concept

Previous layouts work like this: the linear layout would require you to add items to the layout in a given sequence and then those would be arranged side by side (or one on top of the other); in the grid layout the concept is similar, but items are now associated to X,Y indexes to represent the row and column where they should be inserted.

The Anchor Layout breaks with this paradigm in the sense there is no pre-defined concept of how should the items be arranged. The final position of each item is totally dependent on how you set the anchors. In other words, the anchor layout is a very, very flexible layout.

While most layouts are flexible to some extent and allow you to configure parameters like spacing between items or margins, the Anchor Layout brings flexibility to a new level. It was also our goal to make the setup process something easy. We didn’t want to expose hundreds of abstract parameters to the user, instead, we wanted to provide a high-level API and concept. Besides making the coding more rewarding, that would make it easier to translate into C++ code, the UI designers ideas and way of thinking. That’s what the anchors are about.

In this layout, each item has six anchorage points, which are Left, Right, Top, Bottom and the Horizontal and Vertical centers. The user is then responsible for connecting the anchorage points of different items to the others, and to the anchorage points of the layout itself. These connections are made through the use of the so called Anchors, that have well defined sizes.

Then, based on:

- the anchors created,
- the size hints of each item, and
- the size of the layout itself

the layout engine calculates the appropriate geometry of each widget.

Real world Anchor Layout use cases

Here at openBossa we have been involved on the development of rich-UI applications for long, and it was with that experience in mind that we started contributing with the guys from Qt on the development of the QGraphicsAnchorLayout.

Bellow you will find a few use cases of ours that were not handled by existing layouts and work fine with anchors.

Transition between screens

We often want to make a transition between two screens of the same application. Imagine the user performs an action that should hide the current screen and show another one.

In a rich UI application we probably want to animate such transition, one of the alternatives is to apply a fade-out or blur to the current screen until the new screen is seen. To achieve that, we want both screens to occupy the same position on the screen, the old one being in front of the new one (higher Z value). Then it’s just a matter of changing the opacity of the screen on the front and voilà, we have the effect.

So, how do we use a standard layout to make one widget (next screen) occupy the same position as another one (current screen)? We couldn’t do that with existing layout. With anchor is just a matter of anchoring both screens edges to the layout edges (right of item to right of layout, left to left, and so forth).

Usage of AnchorLayout to set two swallows on the same place.

Off-screen items

Another common trick used in UI animations is to have an off-screen item get “inside”  the screen or vice-versa. For instance, imagine a toolbar on the top of the screen that shows or hides itself in an animated way, like “walking into” or “out” of the screen. The idea here is to have two states (QStates maybe?) where the toolbar widget is on-screen in one of them, and off-screen in the other.

Again, with standard layouts we could not create this “off-screen” state. With anchors it’s just a matter of anchoring for instance, the bottom of the toolbar to the top of the layout, thus, the toolbar will sit right above the layout, ready to enter the screen (in an animated way) when necessary.

Usage of AnchorLayout to set a toolbar on or off-screen.

Organic setup

There are also those cases where we have several items arranged on the screen in a very organic way as drawn by the UI designers. Often it’s not practical (or possible) to define that arrangement in terms of several nested layouts. However, with a single Anchor Layout, all items can be arranged precisely.

Try it

There are other situations where such a flexible layout is helpful, however I hope the cases above exemplify the kind of problem we are trying to solve. Please, give it a try, let us know of your impressions. We really appreciate all kinds of feedback, either on usage, performance, API, features, and so forth. All of these will be taken into account so you can have a nice new tool ready for use in Qt 4.6.

Enjoy

We’ve just uploaded a new video showing our latest animated layout example.

You can check it at:
OpenBossa’s Youtube Channel

Or here:

Rather than showing how to animate from one layout to another, this example shows how could a Qt user create his/her own custom layout that uses QGraphicsLayoutProxies internally to animate its items.

From the usage point of view, once the layout is ready, all one has to do is to add or remove widgets to the layout or resize it to see them animating to the right places.

Enjoy!

Check it out at:
http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/programme

And for those who haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss the Bossa Conference teaser at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHM8cUoxmio

Don’t miss this one!

I had just begun working at OpenBossa (the company) when I attended to last year’s Bossa Conference was delighted to experience this unique event on Free and Open Source solutions for mobile embedded devices.

Bossa is different because it goes beyond the high quality talks, those who attend to Bossa have the chance to hang out with the speakers and other participants in a very casual way, all of that while enjoying the best-in-class Summerville Beach Resort, in the northeast of Brazil. Expanding your network and chatting about the latest technologies is incredibly amusing when done inside a pool and under the bright sun of Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco.

A teaser for those who could not be present at last years edition.

Online subscription is opened already at the Official Site.

Don’t forget to read about this year’s list of speakers that include, in no special order:

Andreas Aardal Hanssen
Carsten Haitzler (Rasterman)
David Zeuthen
Gustavo Barbieri
Hadi Nahari
Holger Krekel
Iñaky Pérez- Gonzalez
Karen Sandler
Koen Kooi
Marius Bugge Monsen
Olivier Crête
Patrícia Montenegro
Scoot James Remnant
Sebastian Kügler
Simon Hausmann
Thiago Macieira
Zack Rusin

Best regards!

I’ve been working on the QEdje project and, while studying possible optimizations, our team was interested in measuring whether we could benefit from using MIT’s X11 shared memory extensions. Among other tests, I managed to run x11perf on the N800.

A simple patch was needed before cross-compiling it. This because this app has a hard-coded window size of 600×600 pixels, more than what’s available in our 800×480 screen, thus leading to a X error message, complaining about get screen parameters.

I also reduced the square side size from 500 to 400 pixels in the XShmPutImage and XPutImage tests (shmput500 and putimage500).

The results were absolutely favorable to the use of the shared memory extension as you can see below:

./x11perf -shmput500 -sync

800 reps @ 8.6566 msec ( 116.0/sec)

./x11perf -putimage500 -sync

360 reps @ 14.8336 msec ( 67.4/sec)

For those willing to reproduce the tests, the patch is available below and should apply cleanly to x11perf 1.5.

Download x11perf 1.5 patch

Cheers,

Fleury