New Beginnings

For anyone who still happens to read this blog, or for anyone who falls upon it, I'm hoping to get back to blogging a little more soon. I very recently successfully defended my M.Sc. thesis, so now I have plenty of free time to write code and blog, amongst other things.

Elided Labels in Qt

So for one of my projects I was dissatisfied with the fact that a QLabel whose horizontal size policy is Qt::Ignored will have its text clipped instead of having an ellipsis at the end (or somewhere in there). I whipped together a simple extension to QLabel that puts an ellipsis at the end based on the current size of the label. It's not complete in general (e.g., doesn't really support multiple lines), but for me it gets the job done. Feel free to use this code for whatever purpose you please (i.e., it's in the public domain).

elidedlabel.hpp
elidedlabel.cpp

Expressing Qt Love

The more I use Qt, the more I love it. Whenever I talk to people I'm always expressing my joy about how simple it is to do things with Qt. Whenever I do something new, no matter how small, I'm excitedly telling and showing friends what I've done. For example, recently I had the requirement that I wanted to be able to save images displayed by QGraphicsPixmapItem to a file. In a matter of a couple of minutes I extended QObject and QGraphicsPixmapItem, wrote an override for the contextMenuEvent to display a "Save Image" menu, and a simple slot to show a "Save File" dialog. Now all the images I'm showing on my QGraphicsView can be optionally saved to a file at the user's request.

A really simple thing, but that's because it was done in Qt! If it weren't for the existence of Qt I would probably still be using Java and Swing.