Testing for Endian-ness (byte order)

Although very unlikely that you need to test endian-ness (or byte order) in Qt applications, you may take advantage of some macros available to help knowing how the system the application is running under will store data in memory.

Building Poppler Qt4 Wrapper

Poppler is a PDF rendering library used by several programs (i.e. evince, Oular, LocoPDF, etc.) that comes with multiple frontends (APIs), including a Qt 4 wrapper. As I wanted to develop a PDF viewer for DFF (Digital Forensics Framework) I decided to build latest Poppler version from scratch under Linux. Here are some notes I collected from such a task.

Qt-ish external libraries: getting serial port and pcap functionality into Qt applications

The Qt API is well known for providing a long list of classes and functions that span from GUI to network support, along with to support for XML, SQL and OpenGL. But even with such an array of modules, from time to time a Qt developer may face some issues dealing with specific domains not cover by the Qt framework. Fortunately, some work have been done outside the framework itself that allow us to get support for serial port accces and the Pcap library.

Using Qt for non-GUI applications

Maybe you're thinking this guy is crazy. We all know that Qt is a framework to developed application with rich GUIs the easy and portable way. But we can at the same time take advantage of the core and additional libraries provided by Qt and develop non-GUI applications.

Qt Mobility: new APIs for mobile devices

As a result of Nokia's commitment to extend Qt Framework to more and more platforms, specially mobile devices and telephones, they released a new set of APIs called Qt Mobility.

Automatic Connections: using Qt signals and slots the easy way

One key and distinctive feature of Qt framework is the use of signals and slots to connect widgets and related actions. But as powerful the feature is, it may look compelling to a lot of developers not used to such a model, and it may take some time at the beginning to get used to understand how to use signals and slots properly. However, since version 4.4, we can relay on auto-connections to simplify using this feature.

Dynamic translations with substituting arguments

I already expressed the importance of developing localized applications, in particular, using the tools provided by Qt framework for translating strings. From time to time, you'll be dealing with phrases that may include some dynamic text, it is, you likely don't know the exact phrase at translation time. For such situations, you may resort to variables within the phrases.