Qt

So yesterday was the first evening/night for me to look at some things in Berlin. Even though I've been here for a couple of times I never really took the time to explore Mitte, so Sven Guckes was kind enough to give me and a guest from Denmark, a tour through the city.

While I usually take the S-Bahn or the Underground, we were using the DB call-a-bike service, as I don't have a bike on my own here yet. It's really cool if you need a bike just occasionally, and the bikes had surprisingly good quality. Sven took us through the city, brought us to a good and cheap pizza place and ultimately we ended up iat Dussmann, a big book/cd/cultural stuff store in the famous Friedrichsstraße.

Also, Sven was kind enough to introduce me to the location where our new collegues from Nokia Gate 5 reside:


Photo © 2008 by Sven Guckes

PS: If you happen to get weird crashes with Amarok or any KDE 4 application where the app don't actually crash, but seem to properly shut down unexpectedly, then don't use the distributors Qt 4.4.0 packages. I lost almost an entire hour on that, because I was too lazy to compile my own Qt version at home .

So I am back in Berlin writing my thesis at the Trolltech office here. Lately I've been pretty busy with exams, but now I can concentrate on my thesis, with the notable exception of two weekends: One is FrOSCon 2008, which I will attend on the 23. and 24. of August, but even before I will be in Belgium because...

It is with great pleasure that I realized your porting efforts to Qt 4 in your 4.3 release of Google Earth. Your software so far lacked visual integration on Linux, but now with "googleearth -style plastique" (KDE) or "googleearth -style cleanlooks" (GNOME) it is now easy to make it look less Windows 95ish and more native. That is until you try to apply e.g. the Oxygen style, or just any 3rd party style.

The reason for that is that your product still ships with a complete set of the Qt libraries which cannot load styles installed system-wide. It would be nice if you could follow the good example of your Qt-using collegues at Skype ^*), who provide both a version with Qt and one that relies on the system libraries. This would also cause your application to look native instantly.

All the best,

Daniel Molkentin

^*) Skype allows to circumvent their forced use of cleanlooks by passing "--disable-cleanlooks" as parameter.

We now break away from this blog for a commercial break:

In an effort to deliver in-depth practical knowledge in addition to its books, Open Source Press, the publisher of my Qt 4 book is now offering practical trainings.

The new company to organize the trainings is called Open Source School, offering a pretty impressive programme. Among the courses: Kolab Groupware Server by Gunnar Wrobel, a very active member and developer in the Kolab community. They also offer a training on Qt 4, conducted by yours truely.

Thank you for your attention, and now back to this blog's regular content.

Last Friday, before the KDE 4.0 release event, Tim Pritlove, host of the Chaos Radio Express Podcast (Subscribe) asked me if we could do an episode on KDE 4.0, as he was staying in Bonn. The result is a one hour show called Chaos Radio Express 68. It is a bit more technical than the one conducted earlier with Sebas, but also more chaotic, due to its spontaneous nature (We recorded it one hour before the first guests kicked in to celebrate and watch the video stream from Moutain View). It also references the episode on usability and interaction design with Peter Sikking and Ellen.

Unfortunately for all international readers of this blog, Chaos Radio is a podcast in German language, but luckily there is also Chaos Radio Express International (Subscribe), which provides a broad variety of topics (albeit no show on KDE yet).