On my last entry I talked about the trip to San Francisco. Besides the GSoC mentor submit, we also joined the Trolltech developers days. The slides and examples of the Trolltech event are available online. It is worth to take a look at them although slides are not as nice as having some trolls explaining them in live.
We really learned a lot of such event: Andreas Aardal Hansen, a very smart hacker, gave us a nice lesson on how we could exploit the Graphics View framework to turn CLAM into a cooler environment. The framework has been massively adopted in just one year since it was published, and the reason is that it is just impressive how easy you can do complex and cute things on a snap. The reason why we didn't used it is because we did the full rewrite of the NetworkEditor just before Qt 4.2 which included such framework. Another rewrite at that time would have been too hard.
We also could have a little talk with Thierry Bastian who is responsible of turning KDE's Phonon multimedia interface into a regular cross platform module in Qt. Unfortunately we were still travelling the first day and we missed his talk on Phonon.
Another nice session I assisted was the one presented by Girish Ramakrishnan on Qt style sheet support. Just by taking a look at the latest demos you can realize that Qt application can be very cool and even use such style sheets to let designers enhancing the look and feel of your applications without even programming.
While I was on the style sheet presentation Pau was on the Model View talk. I thought that it was about the old Smalltalk MVC model we failed to generalize in CLAM so many times and in so many flawors. So I thought it was a mistake on the troll's side to generalized it so much, but I just took a look at the presentation, and maybe is worth a try. It seems that they did a smart twist to the pattern to make it worth to work with.
I also nagged Jason Barron, at the support team, with some bugs we found on latest Qt version and some question on how to implement some things for CLAM. I still have to get in contact with him again to get some solution for some problems.
As I said we learned a lot, and we are eager to apply such knowledge to CLAM. A month later we have just applied such knowledge to fix some QtOpenGL bugs but we are planning at some time to port the NetworkCanvas to QGraphicsView.
