I wish that I had Jessie's girl...

Rick Springfield had a great hit with a song called Jessie's Girl and the same track is now used for the Nokia N9 teaser ad which popped up a couple of days ago.

I really hope this is a MeeGo device, or to be honest, I just hope it's a Linux + Qt/QtQuick enabled device with some MeeGo compliance.

I've had quite a lot of fun with QtQuick lately (both for desktop and my N8) and I really enjoy using it. It just open so much possibilities and lets you be creative.

Another thing that would be awesome is if Nokia actually puts PySide, the Nokia sponsored Qt-bindings for Python, on the handset. Having Python as a rapid back-end language combined with QtQuick for the view is just too sweet :)

Grr... I hate not knowing, but I just have to wait and see.

I won the "Travelling salesman" competition!

Nokia held a mobile app competition at its Nordic blog which I won!

For more info, look here

PySide and QML

It has been out there for a while but I haven't had time to try it out, PySide 1.0 with QML support!

This really gives you a über rapid app development environment. The power of Python combined with the awesomeness of the declarative language QML from the Qt framework.

Take a look and feel free to play with the example below:

from PySide import QtCore
from PySide import QtGui
from PySide import QtDeclarative

class Message(QtDeclarative.QDeclarativeItem):

    messageChanged = QtCore.Signal()

    def __init__(self, parent = None):
        QtDeclarative.QDeclarativeItem.__init__(self, parent)
        self._msg = u''

    def getMessage(self):
        return self._msg

    def setMessage(self, value):
        if self._msg != value:
            print "Setting message property to", value
            self._msg = value
            self.messageChanged.emit()
        else:
            print "Message property already set to", value

    message = QtCore.Property(unicode, getMessage, setMessage, notify=messageChanged)


def main():
    app = QtGui.QApplication([])

    QtDeclarative.qmlRegisterType(Message, "utils", 1, 0, "Message")

    win = QtDeclarative.QDeclarativeView()
    win.setSource("main.qml")
    win.setWindowTitle("Hello World")
    win.setResizeMode(QtDeclarative.QDeclarativeView.SizeRootObjectToView)

    win.show()
    app.exec_()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

import Qt 4.7 // or QtQuick 1.0 if applicable

import utils 1.0

Rectangle {
    id: main

    signal clicked

    color: "black"
    width: 360; height: 360

    Message {
        id: msg

        message: "Click Me!"
        onMessageChanged: label.font.pixelSize = 40
    }

    Text {
        id: label

        anchors.centerIn: parent

        text: msg.message
        color: "white"
        font.pixelSize: 25

 Behavior on font.pixelSize {
            NumberAnimation { duration: 800; easing.type: Easing.OutBounce }
        }

        MouseArea {
            anchors.fill: parent
            onClicked: msg.message = "Hello World"
        }
    }

}

For more information point your browser to http://www.pyside.org and download the package for your OS.

You'll also find useful information at http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/Category:LanguageBindings::PySide

Happy hacking!

Qt DevDays 2010

I'm attending Qt DevDays 2010 and really looking forward to it.

I haven't decided yet which tracks I'll attend, there are so many interesting but I definitely go for some Quick-talks. I believe I'll have a great time.

And that's not all, in November I'll also attend a two day Mobile Qt course at Öredev with topics such as Qt Mobility API, Gesture framework, Hybrid JavaScript apps and last but not least Quick. Looks very promising.

IcecastRadio - Qt widget/Qt Quick example Icecast player

I've been toying with modeling a Qt application which supports both a traditional widget-based view and a quick-based (qml) view.

About IcecastRadio
The intention of this project/application is to demonstrate how important
it can be to design a model for your application. If the model is correctly
designed, it can be used from both traditional widget based UIs and
modern UIs built with Qt Quick without too much effort.

The advantage is of course that you can provide both a desktop application which integrates with the native look and feel of the OS and at the same time have a totally different experience UI-wise, for example in an embedded device by only changing the view-layer.

IcecastRadio is actually two applications, QtCast and QuickCast. QtCast implements the widget-based view and QuickCast the quick-based view. Both application depends on a third entity, the model. You'll see this division in the source code in form of three projects, qtcast, quickcast and model.

The application was successfully compiled against Qt 4.7-beta 1 and 2.

Source code
You'll find the source code at http://gitorious.org/icecastradio. The player code is released under the MIT license, clone and have fun. Please read the README file found in the repository for more information.

Screenshots
Must have...

Remark
The application lacks a lot of features that could be expected from a radio player, for example there is no way of sorting the list of stations nor any filtering can be applied. The intention was not to create a full blown Icecast player but to demonstrate how to create a model that is usable from both a widget-based application and a quick-based application.

Patches are welcome :)