QtQuick - From Bling Bling To Blink Blink

Probably most of you already know that QtQuick is used to create amazing blingalicous UIs without too much effort. The declarative QML language makes it very easy to create object instances and setup property bindings, animation, states etc. Lately I’ve been tinkering with my Velleman K8055 USB experiment board and wanted to create a nice UI to control the board. It didn’t take too long until I was thinking a little bit out side of the box and started experimenting with controlling the board with QtQuick but without a UI. I created a couple of QML components on the C++ side to control the input/outputs of the board and quickly realized the possibilities QML provides even for non-UI applications.

Basically what I did was to create a declarative engine and not a declarative view. By doing this you can have a QML file interpreted and access to the object instances created by the engine from within your C++ code. I see a lot of potential and possibilities, one thing that comes to my mind straight away is to utilize QML as a Dependency Injection container :)

QDeclarativeEngine *engine = new QDeclarativeEngine;
QDeclarativeComponent component(engine, QUrl("qrc:/example1.qml"));
Board *board = qobject_cast<board *>(component.create());

Example code to interpret a QML file

The source code is available at k8055tinker

Check out the video below which demonstrates my code:

I've also tagged this post with Python because it can be of interest for the planet python readers since this can also be accomplished with PySide.

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