So I was notified that commits to KDE are HOT, and I am in serious need of some hotness. What could be more hot than working on Kiosk Tool? Well maybe KHTML, but I don't need love that badly. So back to kiosk tool. Back in KDE 3 Waldo Bastian made up this nice little tool that could give administrators a GUI interface around the kiosk functionality in KDE 3. Well 5 years have passed and the tool was in need of some love. First step was to get the last of the KDE/Qt 3 compatibility code removed. That took most of the day yesterday.

Well I have been mumbling for a few weeks now about this "Flo" project and so far I have gotten a ton of encouraging feedback. For those of you who don't know what Flo is, here is a gentle introduction.

“Perfection is reached not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove.” - Antoine de St. Exupery

I have been frustrated with the UI of Flo now for the past week. As mindmaps grow larger, I keep feeling the UI get crowded. Now maybe there is nothing that can be done to fix this. I don't know, but I wonder what you in the audience think. I feel my input is now rendered useless because after 2 years I am so trained on how it works I don't notice the UI braindamages.

I have been facinated with mind mapping now for about 3 years. I have been using it on a regular basis for trying to organize disjointed thoughts, make coherent sense out of brainstorming sessions, and lately for every day design documentation. For those of you not familiar with mindmaps check out the wikipedia link on the subject.

So I have been working underground for a while on a web framework based on Qt but its gotten out of control and I need more help on it. The initial goal was to write a creole 1.0 compliant wiki based on Qt, but soon it grew into a full framework because of the lack of good C++ tools to do web development.

So far I have the following features working:
1) Simple .UI to XHTML transformations.
2) Basic form widget support ( line edits, selection boxes, buttons etc).
3) Rudimentary DOM event to Qt slots working.
4) Full bidirectional mapping of QVariantMaps to JSON objects.

So after a few emails of feedback on MyPoint i have made a few changes and updates to the tool.

The big change is that I changed the wiki formatting to trac's flavor of markup. While I don't like it's flavor as much as say media wiki trac is what I use at work and play. The major gain of this that it is easier to collaborate on content with coworkers. Since MyPoint's focus is to make it easier for developers to make presentations with developers tools I thought this was a wise choice.

I was inspired by Alexander's blog about text based presentation software. This has always been a sore point of mine. See the problem with most software is they are focused on making it pretty but not the content. This imho leads to a wasteland of bullet points with no flow, and people who just read their points right from the slides.

So a few years ago I hacked together a tool that took an input file and generated a post script file that I could display with KGhostView...

So finally i have some visual progress to the wiki editor. Right now it is more of a wiki viewer, but its progress :)

[image:3236]

So far the basic character formatting is working great. Thanks Thomas, Tobias and Hamish for your help. Tables are next. Well see how that goes. It looks like it will be harder because I don't know the table size up front. I think I can create the cells on the fly, but well see. Its not clear how to create a table from the docs. Lists look easy though. Nesting lists are still broken, but that is a parser issue and not a rendering issue.

So now I am trying to put the output of my wiki parser into a QTextDocument. I am struggling with the QTextCursor though. Things are not acting at all as I would think they do. I think its because I am constantly using insertHtml() everywhere still...

Finally I have had some more hack time and this morning I got the last of Creole tables supported. There is still a problem with how I am doing the delimiters of the table pipes when it contains a wiki link. I should be able to fix this this weekend. There are also problems with nested lists, but this is something that I hope to fix this weekend also.