Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - Qt4 GUI

Clarifications for Qt4 interface

JBK — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:50:00 +0100

According to the post that I made about Qt4 toolkit and the comments I have seen about it, here are a few clarifications.

Mac OS isn't concerned about that change. Cocoa and CoreAnimation will remain native.

Qt4 is GPL for all platforms and VLC will stay GPL for all platforms. It wasn't like that before, but it is now true.

On linux and Unix, both GUI, wx and Qt can still be compiled, so if you want a GTK only desktop, you can still use wxGTK. However, we only support and fix Qt GUI. So if you don't like Qt for religious reasons, you can have it otherwise.

On windows, only Qt interface will be shipped by default. If you need the wx dll, you can ask it for the first new versions, especially because there can be some regressions.

BeOS isn't concerned since the trunk doesn't compile on gcc2.95

Finally, some people are working on a GTK interface.

I hope that the troll will calm down.

Qt4 interface: screenshot

JBK — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:18:00 +0200

I know I haven't posted a lot of things lately on this very blog.

I know that the image will not fit correctly the screen, especially if you use an old browser (meaning IE6)

But still:

VideoLAN: What I have been doing lately?

JBK — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:06:00 +0200

Hello to everyone,

This blog has been silent for a couple of weeks. I am so sorry. Let me explain you why.

Google Summer of Code

I had to finish all the stuff about the new students, a lot of discussion, reviews and choices for GSoC. All the team trusted me on the choice, so, that was difficult. But I am very happy with everything we have come up with.

Thanks Google!

Holidays and elections

Two weeks ago, it was easter's week end,
Last week, I was in Bretagne to help for one of my friends' wedding,
Yesterday, I was in Paris, for the French presidential elections.

Therefore, I wasn't home enough to work and document for VLC.

0.8.6b release

As some have noticed we had a small release on VLC branch. This is going to be the latest on this branch, I think. But I had to do win32 binaries and source tarballs... We still have issues with Vista, but well, until drivers are correctly written, we cannot do what we want...

0.9.0 - Qt4

I was chasing bugfix and not really adding new features. This will change in the next few days.

GUI, ergonomics and gestures

JBK — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:14:00 +0200

Ergonomics

Working on VLC media player interface, I found that clicking on menus and buttons was really un-natural. Lots of people have already said that, of course.

That is why I gave a look at VLC media player Mouse Gestures.

Mouse Gestures

Most of the important code was already written by Dnumgis, but not the functional part. There was four gestures and I re-mapped them to have new actions.

Number of actions:

To ease the use of those gestures, I had decided to use only one-movements and two-movements actions, since three-movements are difficult for some people. And I decided to remove all double-movement (left-left, right-right, etc..) for the same timing reason.

So I had space for 4 x 5 - 4 = 16 actions.

New mapping:

You will find the new bindings on our wiki.

Help me with Qt4 development and VLC ergonomics.

JBK — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:20:00 +0100

Help me

This is not a usual message for that blog, but I need some help on qt4 interface for VLC.

In fact, I have most of the things done, but complex things stay, and improvement also. Moreover, I am not going fast enough. So, I am looking for people having knowledge in Qt development and willing to help me on a Free Software project...

I also need ergonomics specialists, to advice me on simple problems.

My current problems

QFont, QFontDatabase, QFontWidget, QFont*, I just need to get to the path of a font selected by a QFontComboBox to give it to freetype renderer... I have found no solutions yet, even asking to Trolltech engineers... (and no, I don't want to use Qt to render the subtitles)

QFileDialog hacking for opening the files (QFileDialog::filesSelected seems to be emitted ONLY when you validate the selection and not on change)

Main ergonomics

I need help to speed up

Join and help me

You know how to contact me :D

Qt4 Interface

JBK — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 16:37:00 +0100

Qt4 Interface

I am going to speak a bit of the new Qt-based interface and the FUD I have seen around this future interface.

A new UI should be shipped with VLC media player version 0.9.0.

First, it will be shipped in parallel to the wxWidgets Interface
Then, it will replace totally the wx Interface.

Why ?

This is the most asked question... There are a few answers:

We had a lot of problems with right-to-left languages,
We had a lot of problems with Unicode and Wide-Characters support,
We lacked a few features,
We needed to enhance this UI, and the main coder left,
To test something new.

So, as we couldn't stay with wx, we had basically two choices Multi-OS:

The choice has been what the motivated coder had choose (zorglub), and also because Qt4 provides a shorter code and a bit easier to read. Zorglub wanted to test it, so let's go.

FUD

Qt is evil! Qt is not Open Source

Come on, this troll is not true anymore, and it has been said over and over, pfff. I know that good trolls are getting rarer (especially because of SUN... :D)

Why are you moving to KDE ? VLC is going to use all my RAM !

OMG! This is because a lot of people don't do the differences between KDE and KApplications and Qt and QApplications.

VLC will be using QT libraries not KDE libraries, so not to worry about it.

People using KDE4, will inherit the KDE presentation, and other people will have the cleanlook style, which is very gtk...

I am going to fork VLC

Pfff, I don't believe you. And you don't have to, because VLC is a very modular program, and you can use it without a GUI.

But, if you feel the time to improve the old wx interface or code a GTK-based interface, please do so, and submit the patches that we will integrate in the trunk, so you will have only to provide new compilations with the ~~enable-gtk or~~ enable-wx. VLC is open source and we welcome all the efforts toward us.

Just a thought about linux desktop and Wars.

I have been so bored about the FUD and the Wars between KDE and Gnome and the graphical libraries...

I have also been so bored of seeing two time the same development one based on KDE libs, the other one on Gnome libs, when it could juste be based on Qt libs and GTK libs. A lot of things should be standardized and should not rely on the desktop manager...

About look and feel integration, when you use GTK software under KDE, you use the 'gtk2qt' GTK+ engines that makes the default Qt draw your application.

But, under gnome, you don't have a 'qt2gtk' Qt engine that would let the defaut GTK+ engine draw the application ! Why ?

When Qt4 interface will be shipped ?

When it will be ready :D