Coders Edge
  
Modern Application 
Development
Android, 
Qt, Webkit, Ipad
Qt Creator

Diving into the qtcreator to see what I can do and creating a mobile application.

It was easy install qtcreator using yum. Very quickly I was running it. It starts on the welcome screen and it give you a help menu right off. Well, I guess they know that you will need it. There are also a lot of tutorials, so what do I need to say anything about it?

I love the 'copy project' feature that is smart enough to know that the area of the storage is write proteced and that the project doesn't go there. It asks for a place to copy the project. Nice!

I like the idea of having the welcome panel as an option, which Qt Creator gives you. Finally just integrating in the 'need to know' aspects so that using this tools isn't so hard to fathom. That's what progress does: it makes simple things even easier. It takes away the vexing complexity. Engineers listen to the users and they work in the aspects of the tool that make it far more intuitive. Not having the tools set up correctly is always a major gottcha. Demonstration programs are very important because they show a real use of the code complete with idioms that may be hard to create from scratch. Coders have all different ways of making things easier in code. simplifying help and tutorial interfaces just makes it that much better for real-world power-users and folks like myself who want to see how far they can take the tool.

dynamic scene really does it for me as a demo. Dynamic Scene is one of the qml demos provided in a Qt Install, and easily available from the welcome panel of Qt Creator. It lets me add code for my own objects if I want to. It is basically a qml interpretor in real-time. Pretty cool when you get right down to it. What it basically shows you how to do is a very sophisticated object creation playbox for you to throw eggs into (if you want to). Probably a way to have an egg and then have it go 'splat' using these techniques. They probably already have a demo for it.

Suppose you want to build projects from the command line and you have copied over some demonstration code from a web site and want to build the project. You need to use qmake in the project directories. Use qmake like this:

qmake -project

this creates the *.pro file needed for the project. After that you run it again as such:

qmake

and that produces all of the makefiles. It probably will work outside of a source directory as long as it is done recursively, though I didn't investigate that. I'm saying 99% sure that it will. And then, of course, you type

make

Everytime you need to add to the project you will need to regenerate the project files. For example I needed to install two packages (explained below) and needed to then run qmake -project again.

C

Webkit

So much these days is based upon it. Very simple, really, as a widget and it really is that easy. Build a browswer that filters you content to remove what you want to remove and to display what you want to display. Webkit is simple because it shows the content in all of it's glory but it is hosted by an application written by user or the company selling the product. It allows for such full-featured customality that one can do all kinds of cool things to it. It lets the browser live in the application. In the case of a cell phone the application is the hand-held device.

Android Phone

Maybe the Android Phone should be called the Java phone? If it's based on Java, a proven work-horse GUI integrated, memory managed toolset, then what more do you need to know? Java represents an advanced idiom of memory managed objects that was long ago proven an exceptional and useful tool. And typical to SDK and Class Libraries most users need a shim interface that takes away the complexity. What Android does is make a Java cellphone app, call it the Android operating system, leave a way to add to it by creating Apps. I suppose the term App is not really a synonym for the word 'application' anymore. The Cellphone is the application. The App is some add-on feature.

Android uses Webkit which, I believe is written in C++ with origins in KDE. So that made me want to use it when I first heard about it. It's actually just a cool little component that you can pull into a GUI builder and then place all your controls around it. It wasn't any harder to pull one of these into the application than pulling in a menubar or other control. Webkit? Android? Nokia? KDE?

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  WP April 4, 2011

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