QML - caching network resources
Qt Quick makes it easy to write network-aware applications like the exemplar Twitter and Flickr clients. However, constantly going to the network (say for a Twitter user's avatar) isn't particularly friendly - or fast. Lauri Jaaskela shows how you can minimise your application's network traffic on his Forum Nokia blog: When learning QML I noticed that network resources were getting reloaded from the network all the time. On a desktop with fast network connection this is not that big of an issue, but may be quite annoying on a mobile device, where data connections are often slow and expensive to use (and caching everything to memory is not an option either). Fortunately implementing a very simple network data cache turned out to be quite easy with a little C++.
Trying to use RDS to auto-tune car radio & N900 FM transmitter
Bruce Peterson is following up his E.F.F. (empty frequencies finder) with a more car friendly transmitter control: The goal is to create an app that you will press a button and will automatically scan (with the use of transmitter => no headphones are required) and set the transmitter to the first empty freq found. The app will also start a daemon that will check the signal level of the freq that the N900 is transmitting and if it goes bad (like when driving) will automatically rescan and set the transmitter and the ex. car's reciever (using rds af....hopefully) to the first empty freq found. Kevin Leacock points out a potential problem with the latter, though: RDS auto-follow works by comparing the signal strengths of the various frequencies broadcasting the same station. However, the N900's FM transmitter can only transmit on a single frequency at a time; meaning that even if the N900 let the radio know what other frequencies it could switch to, it never would.
QML Scene Graph demo
Kaj Grönholm has pasted a short demo of the QML "scene graph", an attempt to make the path between QML effects and the GPU as short as possible. He says, At first, everything is gray and plain. But once you enable QUIt mode, the whole world feels a lot more colorful and dynamic. Some call this feeling velvet, I call it.. exciting 2011!