life.events.each { |event| learn_from(event) }

What’s been keeping me up late at night recently? Well, recently, it’s been a side job; however, somewhat less recently, I started a program called Quill. Quill is a Qt equivalent to Xournal, which is a tablet journaling program written in Gtk. But I didn’t just want to make a Qt clone, as that’s neither here nor there. Instead, I used Quill to brush up on my Qt skills, as well as to play with some of the cool technology in Qt 4.3 (like the Graphics View framework and, to a much more restricted extent, scripting (which I haven’t yet been able to figure out very well)). Quill is hanging out on Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/quill. I chose Launchpad in part because I wanted to play with Bazaar, which I have been using since I set up the Launchpad site, and damn it’s hot. I only hope I get more opportunities to use it in the future.

Anyway, a couple of the features I’m playing with Quill. First off, I’m adding buttons to the bottoms of pages to allow inserting pages in the middle relatively easily and with no menu interaction. Likewise with deletion of a page. In addition, there’s always a ``virtual page’’ after the last actual page. Writing on this page will make it a full-fledged page, but it does not appear in any printing or PDF exports. This basically makes it a very easy way to add a page to the end of a document. Finally, if you hold the cursor relatively still once you stop writing, a toolbar pops up with some commonly used tools.

A lot of things need work. Right now I’m working on getting the movement of a selection to work appropriately across saves. Currently, since such a change doesn’t break up strokes, reloading the page will connect the moved lines back to their original strokes, yielding some very strange streaks. I’m working on breaking strokes apart when moves like that happen, so that this works correctly. Also, the way the toolbar appears and when it does and where it does can get annoying. This is definitely an area for improvement.

And there is also, of course, performance. QGraphicsView and QGraphicsScene are fantastic pieces of technology, but their performance has some issues—especially when moving a selection, for example, where paint clipping becomes very apparent. I intend on looking at some of these issues to see if they can be resolved with clever coding, or if I’m just being an idiot to begin with. Additionally, after a random time period, the drawing based on stylus input becomes very very very noticeably slow. I’m still not sure why this is happening, but it’s definitely my fault, as saving the document at this point and then reloading it and continuing works fine.