Qt and trees

I am looking for a class for storing and presenting trees with C++, at best I'd like it to be a Qt thing. But I need anything really. Great thanks for any hints.

Help Flash 9 on Linux !

Using a webcam in the crazy non-standardised world of linux ? Share the details of what mechanisms does it use with the Flash 9 linux developer on Penguin.SWF camera question
There are a bit of other questions, like which IME should be supported etc. Go check the Penguin.SWF blog out.

I wish Qt was LGPL

Or at least more free. There have been several buisness initiatives recently in which I acted as software design advisor. I was not involved in writing code, but my task was to make sure the software is good enough designed and that its creation process will not take more resources then needed.

All of them were about commercial applications, directed at companies, multi-platform, GUI, network transmission, different stuff usually B2B. Applications were not in fact what was the center of the product, they were just a way to transfer content effectively to clients. The protocol of the transfer was the biggest Intellectual Property behind them and the content was what companies later paid for. In fact the apps were going to be at least a sale good enough to bring back the investment. I was and I am even sure that in one year those apps will be a big hit in Poland among medium-sized and bigger companies.

So what does it have to do with Qt? All those applications were designed by students finishing the Universities, realising their ideas, etc, in short - they had a good idea, they are now going to turn into profit with help from a professional manager (not a student). The problem is, they do not have the money they are going to earn, at the moment they start writing code.

 To write it shorter: to start a company, get an office, buy computers with macos,win,linux, hire developers etc is to pay a lot of money students usually get from a bank credit. Those credits are not enormous, usually they are enough to cover the beginning with a 200$ margin.

Qt was ideal for all of those projects and believe me those projects would be able to pay for Qt lets say after a year (year is a good period becuase statistically companies that cant handle the market, die in around a year, also note that usually its after a year when company starts turning profit that can be used). But Qt will not be used. No project could afford buying Qt Commercial Licence at the starting moment. We sticked to wxWidgets and GTK2.

 Now here is something I do not get, why the hell won't Trolltech build some kind of a program for small, starting companies, that would give them commercial licence for their project free of charge for the first year. It is not stupid! A project developed with Qt that would prove a success and bring profit would mean that after a year Trolltech gets their money when the company buys a commercial licence for the next year (seeing as the application is already written in Qt, rewriting it just not to buy the licence would be stupid and no company would do that, really).

Trolltech would gain a client a happy one too! And a happy client is not only a client that will continue to buy the product but also a good marketing tool.

 On the other hand a company might not bring revenue after a year and bancrupt, well Trolltech would not loose that much in this situation right? It still does not get paid if the company does not use Qt.

 

Who knows maybe someone from Trolltech reads this and next time I am asked for advisory I can tell the company: hey, Trolltech's got Qt, best toolkit there is and they are giving you a hand at starters!







 

gocr, optical recognition and oKular

So i sat down this evening and investigated the possibility to use gocr as a fallback for getting the text layer of a document in oKular (for example if the backend does not support generating text layer information). To let things be clear - gocr is not ready, to say the least. Personally I'd even say the effect of trying to OCR a page is so crappy it is not even worth installing the gocr engine (seems like the total rewrite in 0.40 did not help much). And I am talking about an ascii black text on a white page, without other elements. Gocr seems to go all the way down here - error in 98% of recognized characters, randomly added spaces, etc. For example: content is C unrir in gocr, sounds like drunken elvish to me.

So at least for now, it is not worth it, no OCR in oKular - opensource does not have good, working OCR software yet.

UPDATE: I also tried ocrad, which is advertised as good for latin1 only bitmaps. 3 out of 2400 characters in the probe were correctly matched, content here is C_ll_ICll_ - sounds like a totally drunken elf wih heroine injections.

New feature ideas

Ever used Acrobat Reader and felt it missed something badly?

Ever wanted to be able to do something with a document and your viewer didnt allow it?

Have an idea for a feature the KDE 4 document viewer should have?

Tell me about it! The sooner you tell me the bigger the chance you'll see it in KDE4 are.

Hot New Features!

Having completed most of classes this semester I had some time to hack oKular. I am developing new features mostly alone - Eros is offline since his laptop burnt in August and Albert is helping porting kdelibs to Qt4 and in spare time backports bugfixes to oKular from kpdf 3.5 - therefore the ratio of new features per month is not as high as I would love it to be. It is not low though.

oKular got three new features:

Overview mode

Another viewing mode - you can specify how many rows and columns the Page View can have. Plus you can have a continous and a non-continous one. Useful for looking through the whole pdf in a hasty manner or just checking whether all pages of a print are ok.

Editor-like text selection

Ever bothered the select tool was just too big for what you wanted to select? Editor-like text selection is the thing for you. It feels like kate ;) Plus in the future i'm going to add selection of images too and later Richtext copying to clipboard :) Yay oKular!

Hardware blending!

Yes, since KDE4 is for now a bit far away, oKular uses XRender directly to create the alpha-blended selection rectangles. Now selection is faster then ever. Thanks go to fredrikh for giving me an idea on how to implement it. oKular could damn use Qt4, but I will blog about it later today.

Postscript support is back

Well not a new feature as it already existed, but now with libqgs separated and cleaned up (and released), it is faster then ever! Sometimes even faster then pdfs.

Here is a sample of what all the features together look like.