troll tech dev days '05 in san jose

i spent the last few days in the san jose area for trolltech developer days. after arriving, checking in and getting some sleep i headed over to the trolltech offices in palo alto where i met up with a bunch of the trolls i hadn't met yet including lorn (who works on qt embedded stuff and accidently left me behind at the hotel) and sam (who's doing some seriously kick ass things with thin client software, but more on that in a bit). scott collins was there as well as a bunch of people from the oslo offices who were starting to arrive.

all except matthias ettrich, who it turns out got stuck in london. when he did eventually manage to make his way to san jose a day later, his luggage didn't manage the same feet, so it wasn't the most fun of journeys for him.

i hacked on unserwidgets in the san jose offices for a while as well, since my talk walk through was canceled on me unexpectedly (as it was to happen twice more no less). the only thing i have left to add is the ability to define the methods for multi-page containers, which is fairly trivial. i did a bunch of kicker bug fixing today, but will get back to unserwidgets over the weekend. i showed it to some of the people at dev days and several asked if they could get a copy of it. this allowed me to discuss kde with them since that's where they'll be able to grab it from.

interestingly, many people asked me how to use various kde technologies in their Qt apps. no less than 5 different companies did so, actually. a couple asked about khtml, one asked about katepart and the rest were inquiring about the topic in general. apparently ISV's out there have been watching what we're doing and wanting in on the action. when i informed them we are looking at a win32 and macos port of our libs which are all lgpl'd (or more permissive) eyes widened.

the wrap up party after the first day was great, and i played pool and poker with a bunch of kde hackers, trolltech people and random attendees. good fun. i had conversations with people from adobe, disney, boeing and more. there are a lot of very big companies using trolltech's technologies in very serious ways.

on the second day there was a series of truly kick ass presentations. first there was synopsys who is a fairly large company (1600 devs) that creates eda software and provides services around them. they are huge qt fans and the fellow who presented on their experiences with qt practically gushed over it. he demod some of their software which is insanely complex and very cool. it handles visualization of data sets in the tens of millions of records like a dream and is often used on 64 bit systems due to the memory requirements of these visualizations. he claimed that using qt was probably one of their best decisions ever and discussed how they go about designing their interfaces and implementing them.

but it was haavard's and ettrich's presentations that were really mind blowing. besides noting the growth of trolltech (80->140 employees in the last 12 months, the recent multi-million dollar investments in the company, etc) and expansion of both their management expertise (bringing on new people for the CTO positiong and to oversee the embedded devices push) and product scope (now that qtopia is based on qt4 and with expanded macos support, qt4 claims quad-platform coverage) there were the following technology announcements:

Qt-COCO

named after coco channel who said one can never be too rich or too thin, the trolls have been working on a thin client framework. it works with any qt app and os combination. i saw it running in their palo alto offices and my jaw didn't just drop, it just about fell off. sam magnuson, who is working on this tech, showed me an app running in oslo simultaneously displaying locally on a linux and windows box. as he interacted with it on the windows machine, the instance on the linux machine followed along. no x, no vnc, no rdp ... just sweet smooth qt: the speed was terrific (think NX or citrix). and to top it off it allows for local (!) file browsing and printing (not to mention desktop resize events...). it's not finished yet (optimizations, auth and some additional features are left) but ... DAMN.

arthur enables some pretty amazing things.

Qt-Java

haavard announced that by Q1-06 they'll be releasing a tech preview of java bindings for qt4 that will be officially supported. wow.

qtopia based on qt4

well, this wasn't a suprise but hearing more about it was very cool. svg based phone interfaces are on their way .... and speaking of which:

svg in, pdf out

that qt 4.1 has svg support is no secret, but it was dev days that i was first to hear that it also sports native pdf generation. holy crap.

of course, not all things are perfect. matthias noted that 4.0 had some blemishes but that they were working on them and laid out a road map for these issues. qt 4.1 is going to rock. i also talked with a number of trolls about things such as the model/view stuff and issues i had run into with them.

oh, and i have to say: scott collins rocks. he's fun, he's funny and he makes me look like a shy person. speaking of being shy, i went out for some karaoke after the really nice wrap up dinner for the trolltech team. three of us went to a place that was supposed to have karaoke, but they'd stopped the week before. but there was a bar in a bowling alley one block away that was now doing karaoke, so away we went. there are videos and pictures of our antics which i hope to be getting my hands on, at which time i'll post them somewhere for amusement ;) notable moments: jasmin jumping around on stage as he belts out "i'm just a girl" and me being ambushed into singing the olivio newton-john parts of "summer nights".

i also won a 'das keyboard' by getting the best time on a little video game thingy at the kdab booth, much to jesper's chagrin (he had been #1 until i wandered up and bested him by 3 seconds to secure the win).

on the downside, my digital camera crapped out (some "lens error" problem).

and to think: i get to do it all over again in less than 2 weeks in munich.