New version released. Windows binary download available at opendesktop.org!
Changelog:
v0.2 / 2010-07-13
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– time label
– remember position/size
– about screen with website links
– right-click on calendar widget to reset day to today
Although you can hardly call this one a ‘project’, I still categorized it as such as it comes with a matching project on gitorious.
In corporate environments, administrators like to put users in jail, or with an euphemism: a sandbox. At our company, the day has come that we can’t double-click on the system clock to quickly look up a date, do a simple time measurement, etc.. Although I understand it is a bug in Windows XP, it is still annoying as **** since it’s quite handy and why wouldn’t I be allowed to do that when I am adminstrator of my own machine anyway.
A workaround is putting another tool in the system tray which yields the same functionality and why not improve it while we’re at it. Today I created a very basic first version: qt clock example enhanced with seconds hand and put a calendar aside. No configuration at the moment. I created the systray icon in Inkscape and it should scale nicely in larger systray environments.
I plan on making the colors configurable and a written time under the analog clock, with maybe a simple timing functionality as a side dish.
This year I followed a course in Spanish. Ever since I was a kid, when I had to study, I invented ways to not have to study. When learning a new language, what better excuse could I find than to develop a vocabulary trainer? 🙂
This is how the voctrainer project got started on the eve of the first semestrial exams. It was very basic and non-functional for other people, but at least I felt I didn’t entirely waste my study time. 😉 After the exams, development stalled but at the end of the year, once again, I managed to program instead of study. I believe it is now in a usable state, at least, when you know how to use it. 😉
Let me explain the purpose of this program and why I couldn’t just use existing soft.
First of all, it doesn’t replace existing soft (in my world: Parley and KWordQuiz) but rather supplements it. Parley is my preferred vocabulary trainer so I use it to enter my words and train in dedicated mode. Dedicated training takes time and requires you to focus and not do anything else. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could train your vocabulary during the day while working or eating or on your cell phone while watching tv? It’s what I like to call “passive learning”. =)
This is where voctrainer comes in. It is a small light-weight tool dedicated to training (no entry/grading) without requiring your dedicated time. 😉
Currently, its main features are:
Currently, configuration is done through the config file (located in $HOME/.config/Mattiesworld) but a gui dialog is coming. I also plan on supporting 2 configurable profiles: normal and fullscreen.
VocTrainer is open source and still fully in development over at gitorious.
So after all today’s hard work, still some time for a bit wiimote fiddling 😉
I extended my test app to show the raw accelerometer data.
The experiment here shows 2 rolls to the left (and return), followed by 2 translations to the left. One could argue that a translation to the left, from the accelerometer’s viewpoint, is just the same as a roll, since both are changing the gravitation vector temporarily in a similar way. I’d say there still seems to be a difference.. 🙂
Paul, I’m open for discussion 😉
Okay, so I finally got to it. A few months ago I bought a wiimote to play a bit with the api’s floating on the net. It was until yesterday that I actually tried a driver, and since that seemed to work okay, I decided to give it a try myself. My simple goal, being an app plotting the raw inputs. However, it took me a 2 hours more than expected (1 =)) and also a lot more blood, sweat and tears. 😉 particularly because I made a lot of mistakes due to me being too tired 😉 So I will keep it short for now as I want to go to sleep.
I choose the wiiuse library as it seemed adequate for the job and still active (and even cross platform!). I started from the included example and tried to wrap it into a Qt app (hence I named it example-qt ;)). The obvious choice for drawing is using QGraphicsView. However, for once ;), I took the effort to see if there are no existing Qt graph plotting libraries. And this just happens to be the case. 🙂 Meet the excellent QWT lib. It couldn’t be more fit for the job. The site is (almost) nothing but the api docs, but that seemed sufficient. One second I thought this lib would not be qt4 ready, but it has been ported!
Quite a few seconds and segfaults later 😉 I got this:
Nothing fancy, but it does show the roll and pitch!! =)
Note: the wiimote survived the experiment 😉
This version fixes an important crash bug when trying to make multiple recordings in the same session. I never do that, that’s why it was still in there for the 0.1 release 😉
New addition is the ability for timed recordings which you can specify either by duration or by end time (see screenshot). Next logical step is to be able to schedule a timed recording.
Yes, the versioning has begun 🙂 This week I realised it’s silly to put programs like this one online, but it’s also silly to keep it for myself while maybe some other poor pvr150 soul could be blessed by it. =) So, in finding a way to put it online, I thought I’d put it on kde-apps.org. Great site. But it also comes with some “discipline”. I have to state what it already does (aka keep a changelog) and what it doesn’t (oops, where’s the consistency?), give it a version, make at least some source distribution and in return I’ll probably get dumped a sh_tload of crap on my head for producing such a silly program. But in any case, I’ll have a free hosting and advertising for it. =) 😉
So in preparation, I’m making this post to wrap up a 0.1 release.
What’s changed?
I don’t remember actually =) 29 nov has been some time.. mm, let’s browse some cvs logs
some screenshots to close:
my magnificent svg skillz in action for ktvtune icon 😉
Finally implemented this one (got tired of having to scroll/search every time I want to switch between Kanaal2 and VT4 😉 ). Instead of providing a separate setup dialog for rearranging channels I just added an editing mode to the default gui. I also got rid of my sorting proxy model which makes the model more simple yet less flexible. I think it is still flexible enough and that the previous level of flexibility was overkill. 😉 The screenshot is on windows with fake data. 🙂 Somehow my application icon got lost in the conversion. It’s crappy (programmer’s art) anyway. 😉
