Give user the power: Editing ProjectPier

ProjectPier is an opensource  cross-platform application that is written using PHP, Javascript and requires a MySQL database backend. It is a simple, powerful and intuitive software for web-based project management and group collaboration.

Now the present ProjectPier version is shipped with just a single default theme named marine. I implemented quite a few for themes for the project that I made. They did work out nice, but later I realised that open source is not about giving the user plenty of options, instead its about giving him all the options. So I decided to add another table to the MySQL database which will store the theme and ui data and another php form which allows the user to add or modify the looks. They can choose any color or gradient or background image they want to. Javascript handlers manage the textboxes, color choosers and spin boxes. They make Ajax calls to change the required data in the database. And finally the CSS of the file gets dynamically changed using Javascript. Wasn't that tough!! :)

Less of Qt and more of HTML5: Rekonq

The implementation of the background image selector done in Rekonq was coded in Qt. The widgets and all were all coded. But now I've got a different implementation for the same problem. Rekonq uses webkit, so almost all of the HTML5 and CSS3 features are available for use. So instead of creating the popup widget and creating layouts using Qt we can create a lightbox using CSS3 and load the images using HTML5 handlers. Again the file select class of HTML5 will make it real easy to select files from the local disk or from the web. The data file although remains the same. The HTML5 will load data from the XML file using AJAX. This solution will not only make the widget a bit faster, but also coding for it will be a lot simpler. Just like a simple web page. The interface will also be for attractive and making animations will be also very easy.

The 6 images that I intended to load in the lightbox, will be a simple 3 x 2 table and the cells will be image hyperlinks. Instead of controlling the data by the file class of Qt we can use handlers to right the data directly from the HTML file. The entire lightbox will be just a HTML form with submit and cancel buttons. I guess this will soon be implemented. :)

Adding a background image to Rekonq: Concept

The default page in Rekonq provides navigation to your favorite pages, downloads, closed tabs, history and the session manager! But it looks quite blunt with a white background. So I decided to add a feature to Rekonq by which you can choose your own background image for the new tab page. Like the "Add favorite" button on the top right corner of the page, there will be a "Change background image" button on the bottom left corner of the page. On clicking the button, a dialog will appear which will allow you to choose a background image from the previous six images you chose. It will also provide you a field to choose a file from your local disk or from the web. On saving that, the new file will be appended to a xml file from which the browser reads the background image. The xml file will contain the name of the image and the address of the image and the information on which is the current image. Since I'm interested in displaying only six images from history, so I don't need to store more than six names in the xml file at any time. Now when we open the browser for the next time, the browser will check the xml file and load the picture in the background. With the coming of HTML5 and CSS3, features like tile, stretch, fill and center can also be added to the widget.

A giant leap!

Finally I decide to take a turn from web-development and design to open source application development. After fiddling with Qt for over a year and a half, its time a switch over to my old passion of writing code snippets for applications! I still remember the calender and clock widget I made in Qt for Linux back in class 12. It was a nice little application that could store birthdays, reminders and alarms. In short a scaled down version of empathy with better customizable looks. Now its time to get dirtier! Look in bigger codes and make necessary upgrades and changes and if possible add new features. With unlimited access to the software repositories all over the world this is like jumping into a sea of balloons....I hope I'll have the fun too! :)