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Posted by Ariya on Feb 1, '08 4:12 AM for everyone
Let's compare. Google Code Project Hosting (GCPJ) vs SourceForge.net (SF).
You can start using GCPJ in <1 minute. With SF, you have to provide all those tax-forms-like details and wait until your request for the project is approved.
The project front page in GCPJ is cleaner than that in SF. Don't even bother thinking about the old version of SF.
GCPJ's label-based issues tracker is much more usable than the complicated SF's one. Everyone hates a bug tracker anyway, somehow GCPJ is still humanly managaeble.
Often you want to put some information quickly and the GCPJ wiki is fantastic for that. No need to create some web pages, upload them, and so on. Yes there is also the wiki support for SF but how many of you use it or even are aware of it?
The download page in GCPJ is easier for eyes.
Optional goodies are not packed within GCPJ. If you want to display some screenshots, redirect to Picasa Web Album. Need some mailing-lists? Connect the project to Google Groups.
Tracking the statistics (visits, hits, referrers) is easy because it is integrated with Google Analytics, which btw provides more useful information compared to the limited SF's stat tool.
Administering your project in SF can make you scream (aloud!). It's however dead simple in GCPJ.
SF's subversion access is known to be flaky from time to time. GCPJ's might not be the fastest, but so far it works smoothly.
GCPJ's subversion viewer (the very latest feature of GCPJ) is a way way better than SF's traditional one. Try both and prove it yourself.
In short: GCPJ is designed with Pareto Principle in mind. Most of the core features which the open-source developers (who, BTW, do not have so much free time) really need are made very easy to handle. It's rather minimalist, it's not perfect, but it improves over the time. SF is so dull and not for mortals.
Posted by Ariya on Feb 1, '08 4:09 AM for everyone
Blur is an interesting effect, mainly because it lets us enjoy the main object yet the out-of-focus parts add something to the realism. Like in the default KDE 4.0's splash screen:
For PictureFlow, I decided to add the support for optional blur effect for the reflection, as shown in the following comparison:
It is even more enjoyable when you run the demo program and see those book covers sliding, as if they are ice skating. Shader guru can quickly point out the fakeness of the blur. Rather than blurring the "floor" after the reflection is painted there, I choose to blur the reflection for each image beforehand. Fake but fast and fun enough. As for the algorithm, it is the famous blazing-fast exponential blur from Jani Huhtanen, used among others in KDE 4's Plasma.
Another improvement is that the background color can be customized, not limited to black. In fact, black is particularly suitable to do fast reflection illusion cause blending a specific color with black can be approximated by multiplying its RGB components with a decreasing factor. But since I saw that Cover Flow for iPod nano is with white background, I thought I just let you use your favorite color for PictureFlow.
In addition, I refactored the code so that it is more maintainable. For simplicity, the horribly long look-up sine/cosine table has been reduced with the help of simple interpolation. Even better, PictureFlow now supports Qt 4 (Win32, Linux, Mac, Qtopia, Windows Mobile), Qt 3 (tested on Linux only), and Qt 2 (for Qt/Embedded platform) with a single code base. Maybe even Symbian in the future :-)
Posted by Ariya on Jan 23, '08 5:45 PM for everyone
Just over these two weeks, over 5 thousands came to my humble blog from XDA-developer's forum. It turned out that Chad "thundershadow14", based on the HTC Touch port, set to create a PictureFlow-based image viewer and release it as Windows Mobile executables. And seems that people like it, there are already 290 posts in that thread as I write this. It was reported to work on a wide range of HTC smartphones, among others Touch, Trinity, Herald, Hermes, Kaiser, Atlas, Prophet, Himalaya, Wizard, as well as other Windows Mobile devices like Treo 750, LG KS20, Asus P535, Axim X51v, and a bunch others. So if you have an HTC gadget (preferably with WM6), give it a shot. Looks like it quickly becomes one of the first popular Qt/WinCE-based application, this is considering that (as of now) the final official Qt/WinCE is not even released yet!
From these two exciting developments, and since the response is overwhelming (I can't still believe people *do* really bother to mess around with such a weekend project), I want to be a bit more serious and plan to create a specialized image viewer with that lovely CoverFlow effect, designed with mobile device in mind (and targeting Qt/WinCE and Qtopia). From what I read in the forum, people are not happy with the loading time and memory consumption. Of course, this is definitely the case since the example I include with PictureFlow source code is not optimized for speed or memory footprint. It is a typical example program, meant to show how to use PictureFlow only, not as a basis of a real-world application. Thus, a really usable viewer must be implemented differently.
So, folks, stay tuned. Of course you can send me a smartphone, something like HTC Kaiser, if you want. I'll be glad to take it :-)
Posted by Ariya on Jan 14, '08 5:40 PM for everyone
Work is continuing to bring SpeedCrunch closer to become a real KDE 4 application. In the mean time, with the recent launch of KDE 4.0 that sports a new widget style, Oxygen, it's also worth to mention that SpeedCrunch already integrates nicely (with respect to appearance) and does not feel out of place, as evidenced from the following click-to-enlarge screenshot:
Posted by Ariya on Jan 13, '08 6:42 PM for everyone
In the third generation of iPod nano, Apple has included the famous Cover Flow feature. But what if your iPod belongs to the generation before this? Well, AFAIK Cover Flow is not available. Either Apple would like the owners to upgrade or the hardware is simply not powerful enough. Pick your battle.
The solution: use Rockbox. It is a firmware replacement not only for Apple iPods but for a wide range of other popular music players. Since some time ago, it sports the PictureFlow plugin (still in continous development) which has the same idea as Cover Flow. This plugin is based on my PictureFlow Qt widget, something that I have mentioned before. The obligatory screenshot (courtesy of Jonas):
