qreator-discuss team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Stefan,

Glad to hear from you!

I'm on holiday until next week, and trying to minimize the time at the
computer, so I might not be too responsive until end of next week.

I'm also not too familiar with the URL dispatcher in Ubuntu yet, other than
knowing that it already works and that whenever I've got questions I ask
Ted Gould :)

Here's some more info in the meantime: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/URLDispatcher

In other news, a couple of weeks ago I went back to hacking on Qreator
Touch to move it forward. I had wanted to resolve a couple of things that
needed changing now that we've got app isolation in place. In summary, it
was about images being saved to ~/Pictures by default by the Camera QML
component (we don't allow writing to the filesystem outside the app's
location unless there is a good reason, so writing to ~/Pictures was
frowned upon); and then the plugin being shipped as a separate package
(since we cannot install new packages on a RO phone image, and dependencies
need to be bundled with the app's .click package, I've started a branch
moving the sources for the plugin into the original QML-only project).

In practical terms:

- I've been working on this branch:
https://code.launchpad.net/~dpm/qreator/qreator-touch-with-plugin
- It puts the QML and C++ code in one single .pro project, so it's easier
to debug, build and ship as a .click package with a binary (QR scanning
plugin) + QML files (frontend)
- The QR scanning backend is still a plugin, so that there is separation
between the frontend and backend
- It's still work in progress, in particular a few things:
  - Images are no longer saved on each capture, but are instead passed from
QML to the C++ plugin in memory. Now that I got that in place I just need
to pass them to the zxing library. It should not be too difficult, it's
just that I've not yet had the chance to.
  - The Tabs/PageStack mixture seems to be a bit broken on the SDK. Since
it's been for a while, I'm thinking of redoing the UX
  - Quite annoyingly, every time you do a capture with the Camera
component, the shutter sound is played, which is not really good if we want
to do automatic captures every few seconds on a timer. I couldn't find a
way to disable it.
- I've noticed that now the camera works well on the desktop, and captures
look fine, unlike a few months ago. Perhaps the updates to Qt or me now
using a USB cam did the trick?

Some other things:

- Michael Zanetti has beaten us in having a functional QR code scanner on
the store :) https://code.launchpad.net/~mzanetti/+junk/tagger. It's nice
to see in the code how he's approached differently some aspects of the app;
he's also using zbar instead of zxing (but I see no reason to switch for
now).
- I'm not too happy about having compilable code in the app itself, but
that said, it's easy enough to build it and get it running: on the desktop,
just pressing the green "Play" button on Qt Creator or on a device running
the run_on_ubuntu_touch.sh script will copy the code and compile it
natively and run it on the phone. And also, once it's done, we can consider
it as a black box and then focus on the QML frontend.

I hope to have some more hacking time around Christmas to get it in shape
soon, it's really good to hear you are thinking the same :)

Cheers,
David.


On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Stefan Schwarzburg <
stefan.schwarzburg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> triggered by the recent threads on the ubuntu touch mailinglist [1][2]I
> thought it might be a good idea to continue with the qreator software :-)
>
> The main question in these threads is: does the system (SDK or via url
> dispatcher) provide QR scanning / creation ability? And I think we should
> make sure that the answer is "yes, via url dispatcher and Qreator is ready
> to be used this way"!
>
> There is a zxing page [3] where a uri scheme for android and iOS is shown
> that can be used to scan from websites. And since we will apparently have
> something similar on ubuntu touch, we might want to make sure that this
> system can do everything we need. I do not really know the status of the
> url dispatcher in Ubuntu, maybe you know more and know the people working
> on it. The most important thing is that we must be able to return
> information and focus to calling app.
> For the schemes, we should extend the scheme from [3] to allow creation of
> codes as well.
>
> I would love to hear your thoughts and hope we get qreator coding speed up
> to what it was when we worked on the deskpot/python version... :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Stefan
>
>
>
> [1] https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg05449.html
> [2] https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg05407.html
> [3] https://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/ScanningFromWebPages
>