Web on canvas and Dashboard widgets

There are days when I do something quite interesting and in my mind I can almost see myself on a stage in tight, tight spandex pants, long hair, perm, cowboy boots yelling angrily "are you ready to roock?!". People cheering, babies laughing, women throwing their bra's on the stage. It's poetic. Then I remember that I'm a computer scientist and I snap right out of it. I go back to the life filled with math equations on napkins, sleepless nights in front of buzzing computers, stacks of books in corners and no spandex pants (although I can deal with the last one just fine). The fact that I hate rock lessens the blow, but it doesn't make it any less disappointing. So in those moments of sadness I blog, yearning attention and approval, so readily available on the internet. Cough, cough...

I was wondering how hard would it be to create a QGraphicsItem that uses QtWebKit to render pages on a canvas. The idea being that combining full blown canvas like QGraphicsView framework with web rendering engine would give us quite a killer combination. So I've sat down today and done it. At first I had to redo some of the rendering code in QtWebKit and once I was finished I had a QWebGraphicsItem that beautifully renders pages. It being a QGraphicsItem all the effects available to graphics items in Qt are available for free to it. So you can animate, scale, rotate, perspective-transform and do a whole bunch of neat effects on it for free. Once I've done that I figured that it's obvious that this is the best way of getting Apple's Dashboard widgets to work. So I've done that too. I quickly hacked up a class that reads-in Apple Dashboard widget bundles and can render them on a QWebGraphicsItem. The compatibility is not 1:1 quite yet, because some of the Dashboard widgets use JavaScript objects that I haven't implemented yet, like AddressBook object. To be honest I'm not 100% sure whether I want to implement them, I think we can get those things done a lot nicer, it's just a question of whether 1:1 compatibility with Apple Dashboard is worth the extra effort needed to make all those JavaScript objects work on KDE.
First a screenshot of one Apple Dashboard widget rendered and on top a scaled to half its size KDE homepage:


Now a Dashboard widget with a perspective-transformed dot.kde.org page. Since this is QGraphicsView I can interact with the item while it's transformed so I've selected some text on it.

Crackalicious. (no drugs were used while hacking on this, but I did touch myself a little after getting it to work). Furthermore (yes, there's more... what can I say, I'm a giver...) in QtWebKit we have this neat interface that allows you to inject QObject's into the framework as JavaScript objects at run-time, so adding new JavaScript objects is trivial and getting Opera widgets to work would be very, very simple. No spandex pants included though.

Scripter

Before boarding a flight I'm eagerly awaiting the security presentation that is about to ensue. I figure that these people spent their valuable time learning how to point to the ground, back, forward and to the side and someone needs to appreciate that effort. During my last flight I even went ahead and tried to inspect my life jacket. "Tried" because as it turned out my seat was missing it. As the security announcement advised, I "calmly" informed the fellow sitting next to me that "in the unlikely event of a water landing" he's screwed because as a stronger man I'm taking his life jacket. This also prompted me to think about tools that make our life easier (just to clarify, when I say "our" I mean "my"). I've spent a little time yesterday creating a tool that will make my (when I say "my" I mean "our") life a lot easier. So today I wanted to tell him (when I say "him" I mean "you") about us (when I say "us" I mean "it").

I've spent a lot of time writing simple C++ applications to test out some kind of rendering algorithm. Internally we had a tool that automated a lot of it. The tool uses a very simplistic, reg-exp based language to specify commands. I wanted something more powerful. This is how scripter came to be. Scripter is a very simple application that uses QtScript's bindings to Arthur to do its rendering. It allows for rapid prototyping of algorithms and most importantly for me, quick testing of Qt's rendering framework. At first it was a whole IDE with its own code editor, very quickly though I decided to remove the editor and just make it a content widget that monitors the file it was opened with for changes. The reason for that is that I wanted to keep working in my own editor and just have a dynamic, visual preview of everything I was doing. So with Scripter one can be writing rendering code while the visuals effects of the editing are immediately visible. Here are two screenshots of examples included with it:



But the whole beauty of this application is ability to create animations, while seeing the changes done in real-time. I recorded two demos:

• The first one shows me just playing around with an example. In this case it's a freedesktop.org clock.
• The second shows me writing a simple animation from scratch. This one has an added benefit of seeing me hack in real-time, no copy&pasting, a little bit of chaos (next time I should probably figure out what kind of animation I want to do before start recording, but oh, well, live and learn). Fun. This one is 12mb though.

Scripter requires Qt 4.4. If you don't have Qt 4.4's snapshot it won't work. Get it from the SVN at labs.trolltech.com with :

 svn co svn://labs.trolltech.com/svn/graphics/scripter

Revelations

Like many other geeky people I've spent the last week in Scotland. The insane abundance of overgrown egos caused wrinkles at the very fabric of weather conditions in Glasgow and it rained the whole week. It happened to be my second birthday in a row that I've spent on a KDE hackfest. If things continue like this Aaron will have to adopt me, because I refuse to marry him and we're spending way too many "family holidays" together to be "just friends".
I've been always highly supportive of the "Earth is the center of the universe" theory. I considered this to be a side-effect of the fact that I'm the very center of the creation. By association this small piece of rock has got to be in the smack-middle of the universe.
That is until I find a way of developing a dust-powered interstellar spacecraft (dust being the only material possession that I have at my disposal in numbers even remotely close enough to those necessary for intergalactic travel) and I leave this place in pursuit of happiness/aliens. Unlike all other people I don't really want to meet aliens or exchange knowledge/ideas with them, I just want to punch a foreign life form in whatever is their equivalent of a face. Stay with me here, because there's an elaborate reason for that: I'm spending a lot of my time talking to people and for the purposes of a story "I've seen aliens, met them and we chatted a bit about the meaning of life, technology, universe and then I got anal probed" makes a boring story. One that is so prevalent in Alabama. Now if I've met someone who has seen an alien, met an alien and punched it in the face - that person has got my full attention. A way better story.
But for now I'm stuck here, so I used this week to look over some of the graphics code that was written for KDE4. It looks pretty good. Clearly a lot of it has been influenced by heavy drugs and some people have got to be shooting it straight down their aortas for them to have that severe effects. I'm trying to figure out whether to write a FAQ or some scripts to clean some of the mess up. I've also done a little fun hacking. I added sample 3D plasmoids looking like this:


They work very nicely and taking that code allows you to write 3D plasmoids. The examples animate (pretty nicely I might add, but everything I do is at least "pretty nice" so that's a redundant statement). The code is in KDE SVN playground/base/plasma/applets/samplegl* module.

Since for some cards we still don't have terribly good 3D drivers I created a sample plasmoid that shows how to rotate it and have something shown on the back. The code is in the playground/base/plasma/applets/rotator. A movie with the rotating widget is here. And statically it looks like this:



With much love
Yours Truly: militant interstellar dominator (by day), graphics voodoo practitioner (by night)