Thursday, November 25, 2010

Getting started with pyside - Python for Qt

Pyside lets us to develop Qt applications using python language. I started to trying out pyside recently. And I will be writing my pyside learning in the form of tutorial as my learning progresses.

Here are the steps to get started in pyside:
1. Download and install python 2.7 from here: http://www.python.org/download/
exact URL used by me: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7/python-2.7.msi
pyside doesn't support python 3.x yet.

2. After that add the python path to the environmental variables in the windows. If we run python in command window, we should get the following result to confirm python is installed correctly :

C:\>python
Python 2.7 (r27:82525, Jul 4 2010, 09:01:59) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win
32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>


3. download pyside and install it. I used the windows binary for python 2.7 from here: http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/PySideBinariesWindows

Direct URL to download this: http://www.pyside.org/files/pkg/PySide-0.4.2qt47.win32-py2.7.exe

3.a. In ubuntu linux(version 10.04 & 10.10) pyside can be installed using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pyside
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-pyside


4.After its done, run the following hello world python script:


import sys
from PySide import QtCore, QtGui

app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)

win = QtGui.QWidget()

win.resize(320, 240)
win.setWindowTitle("Hello, World!")
win.show()

sys.exit(app.exec_())



If you are able to get a window launched, then it confirms that you have pyside installed in your system and ready to explore pyside in detail.

6. optional- Once you have learned the basics, you might want to take advantage of the Qt tools like Qt Designer to speed up your development. Those tools are available as part of the Qt SDK download. You can download Qt SDK for windows from here:
http://qt.nokia.com/downloads

7. Optional - You can speed up your Pyside learning by following the examples given in pyside website.
You can download the examples package from this URL: http://qt.gitorious.org/pyside/pyside-examples/archive-tarball/master

Friday, November 19, 2010

eKalappai 3.0 released.

eKalappai 3.0 version is released.

Here are the main features supported in this version:
- Supports following 5 keyboards to type Tamil in Unicode encoding: Tamil99 , Phonetic, Typewriter, Bamini, Inscript
- Keyboard shortcut (F2 key) to toggle between English and Tamil keyboards.
- Users can change the shortcut key to toggle between English and Tamil keyboards.
- The keyboard logic is stored in external files in scim-tables format(which is used in: http://www.scim-im.org/scim project) and some of the existing keyboards from SCIM project are reused here.
- Tamil99 and Tamil-typewriter keymaps are made so as to near fully conform to Tamil Nadu government's prescriptive standards for extension to Unicode as in G.O.Ms 29 dated 23-06-2010 and documents attached tender call of Tamil Virtual Academy TVA/SW/2010-11.
(Ref URLs : i) http://www.tn.gov.in/gosdb/gorders/it/it_e_29_2010.pdf ii) http://tenders.tn.gov.in/pubnowtend/uploaded/TD_tvu53245_teder_document_... )

eKalappai 3.0 can be downloaded in the following URLs:
http://thamizha.com/project/ekalappai
http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai/downloads/list

(Reference: http://thamizha.com/news/ekalappai-30-released)