The first day of DevConf started with Multimedia API for KDE 4 by Matthias
Kretz who has done quite a lot of work on the kdemm API, a unified way to develop applications
that use multimedia. He was already able to show a basic application using the new framework which
is supposed to be used by KDE4.
Next were two talks about parallel execution, the first, Asynchronous Programming with Qt –
Pitfalls and Techniques by Till Adam
and David Faure showed a couple of techniques with which you can workaround the need for
multithreading, showing how to use QTimers and a couple of other techniques. In the second talk, Mirko
Böhm showed a structured approach to multithreading using interdependant threadlists and
adding dependancies to them. Pretty neat stuff, although Qt seemed not quite ready for all that.
(Mirko explicitely warned to *not* try this in Qt3.)
Zack
Rusin‘s eyecandy-wanking has been postponed to wednesday because the beamer doesn’t seem to like
Zack’s Mac, let’s hope this will get fixed. Zack did show his work later this afternoon, here’s a movie of it. Note that this is quite
an old notebook, about 4 years old, running XGl on a Radeon 9000 graphics card (!).
Aaron showed a couple of nice features of Qt4 designer, which does offer some new
stuff, such as easier integration of custom C++ widgets, it would be nice if that would be available
from python at some point, too. (But then PyQt4 is still far away.) Dragging and dropping and the
whole handling of layouts have undergone some major changes, which is quite good. There are still
some painting issues, though, but it seemed far better than what I’m experiencing with Qt3
designer.
Here’s an overview of the photos.