Infinity Perl : slack-get, Perl, Qt, KDE and other Open source stuffs

Hi,

I finished to implements almost all features I wanted for PKanaEditor 0.2... in the editor widget. Well that left some works to have a complete application working smooth and fine. But since the editor widget is almost finished, I would like to have some feedback.
So I hereby release the first alpha version of this editor. Please note that this is not the complete application, it do not allow you to save your work and do nothing else but to translate what you write from romanji to kana.

I still would like some feedback about the choice I made in the implementation.
I am particularly interested in your opinion about the following points :

• the way the kana are automatically presented to user (the completion through the "helper" popup)
• the contextual help system (when you let your mouse above a kana a tooltip with a big version of the kana and it's meaning (for kanjis) is drawn)
• your global feeling about this editor.

Please keep in mind that this is only the editor part of the software !
There is still time before the release of the whole program. So if some brave souls could test this editor and give me interesting feedback, I could make it better.

In order to use this editor you have to compile it. This means you need Qt4 (at least 4.2.0 but 4.3.0 or newer is recommended), g++ and make.
To compile the code for your plateform you just have to do the followings :
qmake PKanaEditor.pro
make
./PKanaEditor

I tested it on GNU/Linux (Slackware+KDE) and Windows XP and it should compile and run on Mac OS X and most of the common Unice (*BSD, etc.).
Here is a screenshot of the windows xp version :


I hope you will like it !

don't forget: feel free to send me your feelings about this... Did I mention that I wanted feedback ?

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,
I never talk about my private life (or very few), but this time it had an influence on my Open Source work !
So here is the information : I will be married by june !
And my futur wife and I decided to spend our honeymoon in Japan... So make the link by yourself between this journey and PKanaEditor

So I have begin to code a proof of concept in C++/Qt4 and with some surprise it works pretty good ! Have a look at this screenshots :


Moreover, my new mission force me to code under microsoft windows xp, so I tried to recompile this PoC under windows and it works too ! Have a look :


Dudes from Trolltech made some incredible works ! I know it works since years but I didn't put my hands on a windows computer  in more than 8 years, and at this time I wasn't programming at all... I was too young ;-).

I now lack the XML loading of the data file and this PoC will be a stable version

For those who are interested in Qt programming, I do the trick translating romanji to (hiraga|kataka)na|kanji by subclassing QListWidgetItem and adding a _romanji internal QString to this item. The actual displayed character is set as the item text. Pretty simple, like the major part of Qt programming !!

The only real problem is to find a new meaning to the "P" of PKanaEditor (because it originally means Perl Kana Editor)...

Arnaud Dupuis

After the first package we released, here is the second version.

Changes are only in the configuration :
./configure -prefix /usr/lib/qt4 -glib -opengl -confirm-license

So now the base directory is /usr/lib/qt. There is no other changes in this package.
I'm looking forward for the next Qt 4 release !

Download link: qt-4.3.1-i386-2.tgz

Arnaud Dupuis