Blog moved & new home

I finally decided to get some hosting, and I’ve moved my Blog there. WordPress.com was great, but now I’ve got my personal space with all the storage and bandwidth to host all my OpenSource projects..

As side effects:

• Fotowall has a website!
• I’ve got my shiny domain www.enricoros.com
• My blog is now on ./blog
• I’ve learned PHP5 so I can love Qt4 even more!

See you there ♦

Fotowall One Hundred Thousand

Today Fotowall reached the 100′000 downloads mark! It’s a HUGE result, and it’s even more incredible if you consider that we have no homepage, no advertising other than word-of-mouth and those are the downloads of the XP/Vista release only (we have the linux and mac releases too)!
If you haven’t downloaded the latest release, do it now!

To celebrate this result, here is a short teaser for the upcoming version (that will be out in one week):

A big thank you to the team: Arnaud Tanguy, Alessandro Portale, Andreas Brech, Georges Dubus, and translators Martin Zimmermann and Marcio Moraes.

Quax 4 – a tale of porting

Note for planetqt readers: the title should be ‘Quax 4 – a tale of porting’

Once upon a time, a little application called quax was landed on kde-apps. As imagination is better served by a picture, here is what quax looks like:

Quax after being ported to Qt 4.5.

It’s nothing but a simple and easy to use screen magnifier. You can move it around and place it near the detail to magnify. Plus it lets you pick the color of a pixel. It’s the perfect tool when you’re tuning the style, pixels and gradients of your beloved app It had only one drawback: it was build with Qt 3.

Porting Quax to Qt4

It was the first time I had to port an application from Qt3 to Qt4. Here are some stats:

• The porting took 3 hours (you can see it from the git history, dinner included )
• I did the following:
  • create the project files
  • use qt3to4 with that files
  • make it compile disabling some code chunks
  • re-enable the disabled code in a qt4 way
  • disabled qt3 support from the .pro file and fixed all until it compiled
  • update the packaging informations, readme’s
  • published Quax 4 in kde-apps
• The source code dropped from 670 to 547 lines of code. So Qt4 saved 14% of code compared to Qt3 for this project.
• The cleanness went drastically up, the API of Qt4 is a big improvement over that of Qt3.
• I can’t talk about speed or graphics improvements.. but if you look at the old screenshots you’ll see that the font rendering was really improved in Qt4

Conclusion

Finally I have quax back, and you can have it too! The source code is on gitorious, and here is the kde-apps page. A final thank word to Claudiu Costin (the original author) and Vlad Oancea (the skin designer). I won’t maintain quax4 and I don’t plan to add any features, I’m just glad I can keep my box Qt3 free while designing pixel-perfect graphics thanks to this cute little utility

Fotowall 0.7

Fotowall 0.7.1 has been released today! Get it while it’s hot

New features in Fotowall 0.7. In the top left area you can see the web image selector.

With this release Fotowall integrates with the deep web. You can now search the network with the embedded flickr search pane and add the images to the canvas. This opens up an infinite can of content, all available for your pleasure .

Other relevant features include:

• support for Qt 4.6 (brings animations and transparencies)
• usability fixes (rubberband selection, deletion, etc..)
• cleaner design (new icons, loadable frames, better property dialogs)
• italian, french and german translation
• check for updates and web links

Don’t hesitate to ask for missing features and always remember that you can rotate pictures by dragging corners with the right mouse button

Enjoy your Fotowall!!

BioCheat for XP/Vista

Since so many of people are asking for the Vista or XP BioCheat, here it is: http://biocheat.googlecode.com/files/Biocheat 0.9.6.exe.

The official homepage remains on my gitorious web-automation project. All the other old clones, like the ones on github are outdated and will (hopefully) disappear in time, as the development continues on gitorious.

Have fun

Hello planet KDE

Hello everyone, my blog has just been aggregated into planet KDE.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a long time KDE user (since 2.2), I worked on several KDE projects like okular, kdm, amarok, konqueror, as well as releasing other software like Fotowall and other stuff on various repositories.

This planet is the collector of many of my favorite blogs and it’s an honor for me to be here.

See you soon (with some developer tool hacks…stay tuned) !

E Luana che c’entra?

Se avete un blog, già conoscete la soddisfazione che si prova analizzando le statistiche.. Si può determinare la risposta all’impulso, vedere da dove viene e dove va la gente, capire quali chiavi di ricerca siano state usate per giungere al tuo blog.

L’algoritmo usato da google non è noto ma la perversione di certe persone è ben evidente, infatti è arrivato su questo blog ANCHE chi ha googlato:

1. pellestrina gay – (miracoli di google…)
2. fattispazio – (levati da li!)
3. produttori di croissant – (cerca “pasticcerie”)
4. design soggiorno – (io so disegnare solo caprette e conigli, vuoi?)
5. meccanismi a catena – (cerca “Wanna Marchi”)
6. appartamento da figata – (sono vietati dalla legge Merlin..)
7. conservanti alimentari per dolci – (conservanti “alimentari” ??)
8. migrazione farfalle 2009 conegliano – (speriamo non ci devastino il raccolto!)
9. la gioia di tutti – (vedi il 10.)
10. luana la zoccola – ()

“The Unknown Rebel”

In occasione dell’anniversario dell massacro di piazza Tiananmen ricordo questa foto, una delle più significative ed al tempo stesso commoventi del nostro tempo, oltre che vincitrice del World Press Photo nel 1989.

Il protagonista, del quale non si seppe più nulla (tranne qualche speculazione) è divenuto famoso con il nome di “The Unknown Rebel” (da noi tradotto ne “Il Rivoltoso Sconosciuto“) oppure “Tank Man”.

Una delle immagini più forti del nostro tempo.

Su Google immagini sono presenti molte foto, anche in alta risoluzione (nel caso vogliate anche voi stamparne una formato poster, ed appenderla al muro).

Il Foscolo sostiene che il ricordo dei grandi, ispira grandi imprese. E voi cosa vedete in questa immagine?

AutoGram – The machine Vs The machine

Hello, it’s me again, back on the cheating bandwagon Last time we talked about BioCheat, and now we add another piece of the web-automation jigsaw puzzle: AutoGram.

Please enjoy this HQ stream of deceptive video pixels while I explain this fine new piece of trickery

As you can see, this other frustration-driven program lets you climb the ladder of a typical facebook game while drinking coffee or feeding your pet!

So, before starting you need:

BioCheat – The machine Vs The machine

update: XP/Vista download here

You are happily wasting time on facebook (that site with all the ignore buttons, with noisy stuff from people who call themselves ‘friends’ of you.. you know..) when you unfortunately get hooked up with Biotronic. This flash game is quite nice, but there is a rank ladder on bottom and you’re last. So you play and play … still last, play even more.. still last.. can you see the frustration?! The layman’s answer is to play (aka waste hours) to get better and climb the ladder..

And then there’s the programmer’s answer: I’ll write a Qt program to get me on top!! (yes, and still waste hours ) — Here is the result: BioCheat

The game is in FLASH, so no HTML or DOM tricks, you have to emulate eyes, brains and hands (only 1).