Tuesday, June 13, 2006

In Norway

I've been in Norway for almost a week now. The weather has been real nice for the last few days so I think I even might have been complaining a little less than I usually am when in Norway =)

So for the last few days I've been working on making sure that svg works nicely on top of QGraphicsView. And boy does it rock. I went ahead and implement a lot more of SVG (the more dynamic stuff) and because it's all on graphicsview I can edit SVG's on the fly. Here's a screenshot:


One thing that I've been lacking in Arthur and I hacked around it in QtSvg is the ability to set explicit transforms on brushes (meaning transformations on fills and strokes that don't affect the rendering shape). It's a pretty trivial feature (assuming you know your linear algebra ;) ) so I went ahead and added support for transformed brushes today. So now QBrush has a setTransform method that applies to both textures and gradients and is independent of the main painter transformation matrix. You can do some cool stuff with it like:

Now finally I added some api to make sure that things like the Office 12 Ribbon widget are possible in Qt. I don't think that I'll have the time to finish a full blow ribbon like widget for 4.2 but at least we made sure it's possible to implement it in applications using Qt. Obligatory screenshot:

Now I do a lot of things but one thing I'm really bad at is cooking (for definitions of cooking that include the phrase "eatable meal" because I'm really good at burning "things" - referred to here as "things" because in most cases once I'm done cooking, it's impossible to identify what was it that I was cooking... could be a shoe, you'll never know and the difference is miniscule anyway). My lack of skill there is not a problem in US but makes for a one hell of a diet plan in Norway (i believe the technical term for it is "death by starvation"). Last week I had a real nice conversation with a certain lady. I asked whether she has any vegetarian sandwiches to which she replied "yes! of course" and proceeded to hand me a ham-sandwich. I politely declined and mentioned that one must stretch the definition of "vegetarian" real far before it includes the subpoint saying that eating ham is ok. To which she (visibly excited by the brilliance of the following idea) said: "but if you take out the ham it's vegetarian!". It's really hard to argue with that logic, but no, despite the popular belief "meat-meal minus meat does not equal vegetarian meal". In fact it doesn't even equal a meal. It qualifies as "a something on a plate" (given there's a plate in that equation at all) but not much more. Now a nice thing about all of this is that every morning I get to count all my ribs in a mirror and so far so good, they're all there.