Monday, April 9, 2007

PK Widgets integration in CLAM

And last but not least, the other important change i added this Easter to CLAM has been integrating Patrick Kidd's PkWidgets. This was a really dormant to-do. A working implemtation was on the 'draft' cvs from 2004.

On 2004, Patrick amazed the LAD community with his nice looking PKSampler. I must confess that I never got PKSampler sounding because a bunch of missing dependencies on Debian/Ubuntu. But, a part from the audio work, the interface was really gorgeous. Something that was not so common on the Linux Audio scene.

The nice look was mostly due to a clever combination of free technologies: Qt, Python and Povray. Povray rendered 3D widgets with a realistic look, Qt the interface foundation and the resource system and Python to glue it all.
A clever trick allows to load povray images as frames of an interactive animation to render a widget.

At that time I was starting what is now the Prototyper and I was already messing with designer plugins, i could not stand and I ported some of the Patrick widgets to C++ in order to include them in a Designer plugin.

I exchanged some mails with him but the code was left on CLAM draft repository... until Saturday. I updated it to Qt4, added some configuration features, merged some of the new pixmaps and i integrated them on the CLAMWidgets plugin. The result, now you can prototype with CLAM interfaces such that one:

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