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CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 15

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I do apologize for the burstiness of these posts and sometimes skipping around. I don’t have much free time so I write these posts when something tends to piss me off or befuddle me. Today it was an animated gif.

I got that gif from Icons8. Yes, a site generating nice simple “loading” and/or “busy” animated gifs that are free to use and even has a little tool on the site that allows you to customize them before downloading is getting a plug. Just how cool is that?

So, I went the “standard” path of stuffing a QMovie into a QLabel like we’ve done for years in Qt. No love. Just a black box. This is when it hit me I was going to have to create a cs_gui_hello application. First I needed to verify I wasn’t suffering from old age and the effects of years of Chardonnay at night. I hop over to a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS machine and load whatever QtCreator was installed on it using whatever Qt version that it found.

Yes, many of you would just have a VM if you had that. I have multiple machines with multiple desks and some of the machines have multiple VMs. It’s how I roll. Honestly, it is because that is the way work comes in.

The tiger I bought when I was in college, deal with it. Whatever type of photography was in vogue then had a market and this looked cool. This is actually cleaned up office. Over the past year or so I’ve thrown out about four machines or so.

When clients want a custom Debian package that will install on N releases of Ubuntu but they are using high end features of library X so it can’t go in a Snap or any other low end container, you have to throw hardware at it. Finding the right combination of options and libraries to thread that needle can take weeks. It was even more fun when they wanted a .deb that would install on either 32-bit or 64-bit versions. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

So, first I need a GUI “Hello World” to verify what I believe to be true. After starting QtCreator I tell it to create a new project for me, Qt Widgets based. I put a File->Exit option on the main menu and endure the incredibly slow signal-slot editor connecting exit up to MainWindow::close(). I add two labels, one with “Hello World!” text and another big empty label I called movie_label.

Labels in the designer

Okay, I took the screenshot before I filled the menu in.

Took longer for this editor than the entire rest of the project

Adding a Resource File

This part is for the new people. Maybe you’ve only done QML so you don’t know Qt at all? Maybe you are new to the world of programming or just new to the world of Qt. I’m taking you down this detailed journey because even I had to poke a tiny bit. As more and more worthless (&()&* gets added to QtCreator (QML, Java, Python, etc.) it becomes harder and harder to find things.

Right Click and choose add new

I usually right click on the “Forms” in the window on the right. Theoretically you can right click on any of those entries for this. That wasn’t always the case or at least I remember a time that it wouldn’t work everywhere.

Resource file is underneath Qt
Add it to your project
After adding a prefix

I never like the default prefix. Half of the time I just enter “/” but this time I chose “/animations.” After that I choose “Add Files” then navigated to a series of gif files with different colors and speeds.

Save and close the resource file once you have added your images or whatever.

Note: Just about anything can be in your resource file. For this Diamond editor I’m working on I stuck HTML help files in there. You kids who’ve never been more than six feet from an Internet connection need to learn the concepts of air-gapped and stand-alone. Machines on air-gapped networks have no Internet access. If you want help, all of the help has to be installed with the editor/IDE/whatever. The same is true for stand-alone because those machines aren’t even on a network.

Our Application

The code

Code wise, there isn’t much. I have always been a bit perturbed about parenting of QMovie objects. You either have to provide an empty QByteArray for the format to parent one or you have to construct the object with just a parent then assign the movie in another step. It would seem the could provide a constructor having a non-optional first parameter of parent. What is important is the QDebug statement.

output of application

You will note that this installation pulled from the Ubuntu repos only supports gif. Why this is important will be the subject of my next post.

To play the video below on my Ubuntu 20.04 LTS desktop I had to issue the following from the command line.

sudo apt install libdvdnav4 libdvdread7 gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly libdvd-pkg ubuntu-restricted-extras

Some browsers have their own codecs and such so might play video just fine. I was trying to look at the video locally before uploading to the post. If you can’t see it, then I guess you know what to try. It will also prompt you to run this command once.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg
The test application running

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Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.