Siraj 

video Link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMrAx4AYqk We all know making the top level window transparent is easy on X11 with XCompsite stuff. and I thought I could get away with some simple flag or a function call on mac to do the same. but when actually needed to do it.. I found that this is was impossible :(, unless Qt widget creation was modified. (http://trolltech.com/developer/knowledgebase/faq.2007-02-08.3940505976/). so if you have the same problem as me.. here is a patch that enables Transparency on the top level windows. this is very unfortunate I hope some day this problem will be solved, and if you know a better way to do it, without patching QT it would be helpful too :). the patch is kinda ugly so if you need it just drop me a comment or an email ;-) Read More

At my new workplace Collabora , I got the chance to play around with Webkit during the last few months. and one of the tasks we looked at was to improve and speedup webkit on QGraphicsView, And then produce useful ways to interact with Web contents, So yesterday, I was checking how responsive it would be to add live reflections of a webpage. Here is the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T44QxXCQZzQ. And it wasn't bad as we expected. This is really easy with QWebView off screen rendering, But since this is a graphics Item, We had to do it differently. The code is on a git repo and you can clone it from : http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/siraj/stefani.git;a=summary. Ok now wondering .. "Stefani?" . It's a playful toy we use to experiment with Web content on QGV. Stefani is built around QGraphicsItem with some super powers to render HTML contents. Basically, this QWebViewItem has the same API as the QWebView, but has some extra functions to produce bling. and one function there, emits a signal on content change, which allows us to render a reflection externally . Read More

View Album Finally RMS is here in Sri Lanka, just came back from his first speech which was held at our University in Kandy. looks. if you happen to be a sri lankan or in SL reading, this u can see him again at SLIIT (http://www.sllit.lk). Read More

Qt is getting better by the second. The new QWidget::render API call is so cool that u can do so many thing you like with it, I just changed few lines of the Video demo to render a QCalendarWidget as a Texture on a cube. Can't explain the coolness of the new API in words, simply impressive. (Video Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6731089908367617401); Read More

link to vid : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8237332295074818880 This Friday night, I wanted to do some thing wacky,and it was then, that some one passed me a link on youtube demonstrating Surface PC from Micrsoft, it was playing video and at same time moving in 3D. Hence, this crazy weekend adventure of adding Video Textures with Qt. The decoding is done with ffmpeg, which is a fast and neat library for handling video , the only problem is the lack of proper documentation on it's API, The results which I got after experimenting for a while were amazing. it really shows why Qt 4 is a supper kickass Library 2nd to none. 3% cpu 2 M Ram I was able to load and play the videos in 3D with no pain at all. here is the demo ;-).. I'll dump the code some where, if some one needs it. for none commercial use ofcourse ;-). Video Read More

Finally it was the day for playing with the QTransformations and QGV. and the result is kinda nice, but not perfect still . in the coming day's i'll probably make it more functional and put the 3D flipping effect in to more practical use. so basically what I have done is add some basic icons zooming and rotate the QGV around Y axis which make the view flip like magic. video is here : http://upload.ruphy.org/raptor3dflip.ogg Read More

Few hours ago Fished adding transparency support to the canvas view I'm using . to it to work it needs kwin to run with composition turned on or some thing like compiz running . here is a ogg video http://upload.ruphy.org/raptortrans2.ogg showing the widget in grid mode And a screenshot to make it complete. Read More

video preview : http://upload.ruphy.org/raptorgirdview.mpeg Finally after few hours of work. got grid view working, sad thing is i'm not using Plasma gridlayout but when it's ready I'll switch back. but it works and dose the trick for now. I'll be improving the view and the restof the svn components in the coming days. and also start working on the AI engine , maybe the Fuzzy logic plug in can be finessed first, Read More

last several months have been a hard run, having exams one after the other, but I was able to commit several line now and then for raptor project, this is just one widget that we will use with raptor http://upload.ruphy.org/slideicons.mpeg one of the main widgets we will have on raptor is the sliderview. it's a very customizable view unlike on kickoff, where it slides left and right, Raptor Slider View is meant to be 100% compatible with Plasma API and not be some widget of it's own. it's very similar to what u would see on a slide show but multiple slides per view. arrangement can differ based on user perf, It will support Stack like view and Grid view just like it was proposed on Appeal Project first by Aaron . the view can be skinned using SVG. at the moment i'm working with pinheiro (Amazing Oxygen Artist) and Nookie (good old Buddy) on the skin elements soon we will get the skin perfect and done. I uploaded a mpeg to ruphy's upload server so if can't compile it. see it here http://upload.ruphy.org/slideicons.mpeg. next step is to float it on plasma and add the True Transparency support to the menu view launcher. that should happen in few days from now. Read More

two days after the release of kbfx silk in which we try to simplify the backends and front ends, we got a nice comment on kde-look. actually this was really unexpected. Read More

Yes..the moment we release KBFX slik is down to hours. and we are working on the release and .getting the packages ready for you to download and install . and to give you a hands on experience of some things KDE4 plasma can bring you. While we finish up the work over here. we have a written a small booklet for you to read, about the up coming release . You can download the booklet in PDF format => KBFX Read More

Project Plasmic-Raptor: Unified effort to build a appilcations and utility menu for KDE4. This project brings together all the people who are working on Menus for KDE. We are designing so that we can integrate the efforts from cools kickoff and ALI menu concept as well and Some things from KBFX. It's a nice feeling to be a member of such a team. Read More

Hi. After few months of coding finally this sunday I have some thing to write about. in the new version of kbfx "Code named kbfxPlasma-kde3" but don't confuse this with KDE4/Plasma I have a good reason to call this plasma ( look here >>> http://www.kbfx.org/siraj/preview/test.htm"). yes..it's water effect with some coloring and which I think looks bit like plasma?, lets try to see what kind of new features are going to be available on kbfxplasma..so what's this Utility thing? well Kbfx now supports a data interface where it loads it's data from plugins..separating GUI from Data..and who is to credit for this amazing idea? well..it's our Aaron again! I thank him a lot for his Super duper idea! to make it real, we wrote the Whole KBFX from scratch..(from line one 10,000..(where it stands at this moment); Read More

Link to My Home page for More screenshots After seeing cairo clock.. I wanted to simulate the same thing using Qt4 .. just to show how simple it is to do it with new Qt 4.1.1. it's a matter of getting a transparent widget (using few Xlib commands and drawing on it with QPainter paint commands (Clock hands and Clock face) with Time. and I was amazed by the smooth ness and the images quality of the output and also the speed at it was happening.Most of all it's almost Zero length code to achive this effect (less than 400 lines) and the Clock glass is drawn using only Qt4 paint commands. I'm going to place some screenshots and also the source for this simple two classed clock whitch is a nince a eye -kandy, too sad to send it to trash can I shoudl some make it more usable!. I think this also shows that wonder full things to come with KDE 4 UI's and widgets .. and plasma. Read More

Overview As we know it's been some time since we released a stable version of kbfx. Lot of work has been going on behind the stage..I think users who came to kbfx.org know a lot about the upcoming kbfx version and it's state. but there are lot more who has no idea about kbfx 0.4.9 which we will release in 10 to 15 days from now. Read More

Last month nookie was on irc and we were talking about the msn clients out there. all of them functioned really well except for the look and feel of it. gaim is good but it looks as ugly as gnome it self. then we have kopete which works well with yahoo and other protocols but not so well with msn ( i think we have to blame Microsoft for that. kopete is wonderfully done.). Then we have kmess which is also really cool. but what all these clients lack in common is the themability the look and feel is fixed and there is very little the user can do to change the look and feel of the application.These day's we are planing things to write a client that is themable . but we don't really have an idea about how many people actually want some thing like this. Read More