Older blog entries for e8johan (starting at number 199)

If anyone could get this working I would be very grateful: http://www.qtcentre.org/forum/showthread.php?p=8165.

I'm working from home today - implementing an algorithm involving a physical model... now I've come to the accuracy and dimensioning part. Handing values in the range from +200 to -50 together with e-9 sized factors makes my life really hard.

Just helping out with the HTTP issue.

I'm positively surprised for the response to my last post. Four nice guys offered to help and I'm getting the first one of them up and running right now. It is lovely to see the open source community in action.

I'm wondering if there is anyone out there willing the help me with a spanish translation for SpeedCrunch. The application might get some attention in a spanish computer magazine and I feel that begin able to provide such a translation would be great. If you are willing to help, please mail me at e8johan -at- gmail -dot- com.

Update! I've got a contact now, thanks!

Lets not get upset and start to fight over some silly C++ bashing blog post. I checked out the C++ ISO standard draft and the result from Callum's example is undefined. Look at chapter 14.7.1, paragraph 12. For those C++ lovers out there who prefer GTK+/Gnome over Qt/KDE (how can they? ;-) there is the gtkmm bindings. That is, Callum's invalid code can be a part of a Gnome app as well as a KDE app, so lets not turn this into a flame-war.

I've been somewhat productive today. First I've been merging corrections into the Independent Qt Tutorial. Thanks for all the feedback. Then I've been splitting the SpeedCrunch site into a translatable part and the english-only parts (download and development).

Next in the pipe-line is the first release candidate for SpeedCrunch version 0.7.

I've been really busy the last couple of weeks but now I'm going on a business trip for the coming two weeks. That means lots of boring nights to kill of at the hotel (I'm not a bore, it is just that I'm going to Jokkmokk, so the nightlife is limited), i.e. hopefully a new release of SpeedCrunch and an update of the Independent Qt Tutorial - Qt 4 Edition (TIQT-4 from now on).

After a far too long lack of updates, the Independent Qt Tutorial is finally joined by a Qt 4 Edition. This time things are going to be done the Right Way, so everyting is scripted from a single source. The source code examples are copied directly from the compilable example sources into the HTML document and all off-line contents will be generated automatically. I write will be as there is alot of work left:

At Chalmers, Human-Computer Interaction was not my favorite course. I thought that it was a too soft subject and nothing for real engineers. Now, I've come about and changed my mind.

The user interface of SpeedCrunch can be stripped down to the bare essentials. This saves screen estate, but does not show the unexpecting user that this is a calculator.

To show the user that there is more to it, the Evaluate button is available, and a clear all button is thrown in for good measure. These buttons are optional. All screenshots of this entry shows the same application with different settings.

This interface makes it clear that you can evaluate something and most users will start to type away at the keyboard and then press evaluate - or enter. However, the application does not look like a calculator and it does not tell the user what to expect to be evaluated. Hence, a key pad is available in the 0.7 version.

The screenshot above shows a different key pad layout than used in the 0.7 version. This keypad offers more common functions (asin/acos/atan instead of sinh/cosh/tanh - my maths tutor, Bernhard, will be disappointed, he really liked the hyperbolic functions). It also divides the keys into the groups digits and dots, basic counting, variables and advanced functions. Also, the "=" button has changed from assignment to evaluation since even I did use it in the wrong way. Now, the "x=" button shows how to achieve assignment.

Not to the interesting question. When offering all this user interface parts, how do I make the user turn them off to fully apprechiate the purpose of SpeedCrunch? There is the Windows way with balloons asking the user this now and then but that just makes me annoyed. Then there is the start-up tips, but I mostly ignore those and turn them of at once.

The only solution that I can come up with that is intuit enough would be to offer a shrink button (an arrow or a cross) that would allow the user to do this. But in that case - should that widget go away with the key pad, or stay there to let the user get it back in the same way that it was hidden? A user may hide the keypad by mistake and then not find a way to get it back... at the same time, such a widget would take screen space from the advanced user.