Nokia Rules!

There's a conference in the southern part of Sweden (Malmoe) called Oredev which I have been attending this week. I was interested in a talk about MeeGo, meet some Nokia people and to attend a two days Qt course.

Nokia had a booth and I was passing by to check out if they had some Qt stickers which I needed for a demonstration (a simple QML app) I was going to show at my employers booth. To my disappointment they had no stickers but instead I had a great chat with one of guys.

We had an interesting and giving chat about Qt, apps, OviStore, Nokia and MeeGo. Suddenly the guy grabs a package and hands it to me, to my surprise I just realized that he gave me a Nokia N8! He smiled at me and told me to make my app available on OviStore.

Now finally Nokia has given me the opportunity to develop apps for mobile devices since I can use Qt (I already made an app w/o owning a device).

I can't wait for MeeGo devices to show up.

Thanks Nokia!

Getting Interactive With PyQt

One of the cooler features with PyQt (IMHO) is the possibility to write Qt code interactively. It isn't actually something new and I'm sure it's been there for a while but some of you might not be aware of it. I find it very useful when I want to learn new things in Qt, so without further ado, here's a short introduction on using it.

Start an interactive python session by executing python in a shell:

$> python
Python 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Sep 15 2010, 16:22:56) 
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Let's create a simle top-level window (I wont add the '>>>' in case you would like to copy/paste the code):

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyQt4.QtGui import *
app = QApplication([])
window = QWidget()
window.resize(400, 300)
window.show()

Now you should have a window similar to the screen shot below:

Ok, let's create a push button:

button = QPushButton("Click Me!", window)

Hmm, no button shows up... Why? Well, that's because we need to make it visible after we have added it to the window:

button.show()

Ahh, sweet! We have added the button to the window interactively:

Let's put the button at the center of the window by using a layout manager:

layout = QHBoxLayout(window)
layout.addWidget(button)

And finally, let's see how 'layout.addStretch()' affects the layout:

layout.addStretch()

You can easily add a slot to the button's clicked signal:

def mySlot():
    print "Button Clicked"
button.clicked.connect(mySlot)

As you can see, it's an easy way to try out thing in Qt.

Thanks for reading!

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.