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 :)

Python Koans - A Great Way to Learn Python!

I just found out about Python Koans by Greg Malcolm (thanks dude) after listening to the from python import podcast podcast (which I find amusing, thanks guys).

It's an awesome way to learn Python. Instead of just reading tutorials and/or books you learn Python by coding.

The interactive tutorial is built around unit-tests and you advance and gain new skills by passing tests and it's really funny. You do learn a lot about the Python language when doing the Koans so I recommend it even if you've been using Python for a while.

Another cool thing is that you learn how to do unit testing in Python, if you're not already familiar with it.

My python fix

It has been a while since I did something in Python. I've been coding C++, Qt and Qt Quick lately and I do enjoy it, especially Quick. I really like the declarative way of describing UIs.

But I still need my shot of Python now and then. Often I end up just doing small non useful snippets like list comprehensions stuff. I just love them, they are so beautiful and they make me happy :)

>>> # Find the longest words
>>> words = "Some random words in a text string"
>>> max([(len(w), w) for w in words.split()], key=lambda x:x[0])[1]