The ForwardBias Blog » roop

Hyves Photo Uploader 1.2: Do More

roop — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:12:01 +0000

Late last year, I blogged about the beta release of Hyves Desktop. In about half-a-year, the application has grown much more than just helping folks upload images to Hyves. It now has some very interesting features to help you spice up your photos. Here is a short video demo showing off some of them:

You can download the app for free from http://hyves.nl/hyvesdesktop/download (but you need to have joined Hyves (for free again) before you can download it).

A lot of work has gone into this 1.2 release from the Hyves Desktop team: Arend, Boud, Girish, Markus and self. We’ve also designed the application in a unique way – the main screen’s ui is in html/js, with each core functionality coded in C++ and integrated into the app as a Qt/Webkit plugin.

We can already see how popular the pimping and effects features are, by the sheer number of photos in Hyves tagged gepimpt. Keep em coming, folks.

Crude canine saves another planet

roop — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:37:00 +0000

Some time back, I started off a planet for NGOs at ngoplanet.org based on rawdog, not long after planetkde’s switch to rawdog. NGO Planet does rss, opml and blogs listing, just like planetkde, but takes a different route to do all that (and opinion is divided on whether that’s for better or for worse ).

Instead of using jriddel’s rss plugin that powers planetkde (unfortunately, I could not install libxml2 on my hosting provider, which is needed by the rss plugin), it dumps each form of output just by using a different template for each. So, with a minor tweak to rawdog code, rss is dumped using a rawdog template like this and an itemtemplate like this.

For the blog listing, it takes in an additional config parameter called feeditemtemplate that specifies the template for generating the list of feeds. The same infrastructure is thereby used to dump both the blog listing and the opml output, using separate set of templates for opml and bloglist. The complete set of code changes is in this github repo.

I do feel that hacking on the templates is an easier and more powerful way to extend rawdog (though I do realize that the creator of rawdog thinks otherwise). On the downside, this requires rawdog to be run multiple times, once for each type of output, unlike how it’s done with planetkde – that’s probably fixable, though.

PS: A secondary purpose for this post is also to shamelessly bump NGO Planet itself , so if you know of any blogs about NGOs anywhere in the world, please tell them about NGO Planet.

The Hyves Photo Uploader

roop — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:36:00 +0000

A new desktop client for Hyves, the top social networker in The Netherlands, was out yesterday as beta (paid members only, for now). It’s a chat client, blog/media/event notifier and photo uploader all rolled into one. Girish and self have been working on the photo uploader part of it for over a month now (half of that time in a cold, wet and absolutely charming place called Amsterdam), with oodles of help from Arend and Boud, and it’s looking all neat and slick now. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Written using Qt/C++, Javascript and the public hyves api .

On the same topic: Boud’s blog , Official blog (in english)

(Are we anti-social or what? Hyves is the first social networking site I joined, and only when we started working on this (same case with Girish, I bet), and I have a grand total of 5 friends (one of them being myself with another username). Another case Boris in the making? )

Drop caps

roop — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:35:00 +0000

Last week saw the introduction of a brand new feature in KWord: crap drops. Er, I mean, drop caps. You can specify how many lines it should span, how many characters to drop, and even the extent of horizontal gap between the dropped chars and the rest of the paragraph (all only through the odf file, for now). But if if you ask me, I just like the plain old three-line single character drop char (thanks, Thomas, for the screenshot).

Compared to Word 2007 and OpenOffice 2.3, it works pretty much the same usual way in, er, usual circumstances. But in subnormal scenarios, like for example, when the paragraph doesn’t have as many lines as how many lines the drop cap spans, or in the case where the paragraph has a mix of quirkily extreme font sizes, all three word processors behave differently, and somehow, I can’t point to any of them and say that’s outright wrong. So, if you have any inputs on how KWord’s drop caps behaves or should behave in certain situations, please leave a comment or mail me.

Now for the how-stuff-works part. What I’ve done is, create a separate new line for the set of dropped characters (setNumColumns), and increase their font size on the layout by the number of vertical lines they should span (setAdditionalFormats). Then it’s only a matter of shifting out a few subsequent lines horizontally without changing their vertical positioning (setPosition) and reducing their width to accommodate the dropped characters abreast of these lines. That, in brief, is about it. Mostly.
Sample odts: dropCapsLines.odt, dropCapsLength.odt, dropCapsDistance.odt

KOffice can strike out anything

roop — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:10:00 +0000

We added a feature in KWord yesterday that lets you strike-out a text, like “wrong word” with any custom text, like “x” or “—x—” instead of the boring “~~wrong word~~” style (example odt). You can also use any custom text to fill the whitespace created by a tab (example odt). Rather advanced text editing, I’d say. And it turns out that it you can get it to create some rather funky patterns.

The one on the top is done with ‘o’s struck-out with with ‘O’s. And the next one has ‘/’s struck-out with ‘| – ‘. These strings can be specified in an ODT file and read in, but as yet there’s no interface in KWord to create such a document directly.

Now that we have this, if there’s any artist making ASCII art who wants an alpha channel in his “images”, KWord will be his tool of choice.

And we’re on

roop — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:22:00 +0000

We launched our website today, a bit under three months since we founded ForwardBias Technologies. While that might be considered a rather long period of sitelessness, on the brighter side, we’ve been busy. We’re onto the endgame of building Spambin, our spam-blocking software for mobile phones (you can register here for beta). And we’re neck deep into improving ODF support for KWord 2.0, supported by NLNet Foundation. Girish has been involved in a slew of other Qt-related projects as well.

On the more mundane admin side, we’re now, well, a company, officially speaking. One with a consulting agreement with Trolltech for offering Qt services and a developer certificate from Symbian for distributing S60 software.

So, there. We’re on.
QED.