First update in a LONG time (Spoiler: ROV-Suite updates)

Hey!  It's been a LONG time since my last post (too long for my taste), but I've been pretty busy.  I finished up my freshman year of college well.  I had a great time!  I've also learned a lot about programming and CS in general since the last time I worked on one of my projects so the quality of my work should be increasing.

For this summer, I'm interning at a large software development company in NYC.  I just moved in recently but I've been having a great time so far!  It's very cool to live in a big city and the company's work seems really interesting.

I've also been planning improvements, features and bug fixes for Monterey for months now.  I didn't have time while in school (and I barely have time now that I'm working from 9-5), but I'm trying to get some updates for Monterey pushed out as soon as possible.  The biggest change that I'm currently working on is allowing people to configure their ROV from a simple JSON file and having Monterey's UI and networking code take care of the rest.  See here for more information.

Another big improvement for Monterey that I have planned for this summer is unit testing.  Yes, one of my big goals is get Monterey set up with a unit testing framework.  More on that later!

Thanks,

Chris

Monterey 3.0.0 - Windows Executable Released!

Hey!  It's been a while since I last wrote an article.  I've been kept pretty busy with school work (2 CS classes, a math class, physics and a job on the side).  Anyway, I received some incredibly nice emails and PMs the past few days from some users from the Homebuilt ROV Forums thanking me for working on Monterey and releasing it for free.  They had some feedback for making Monterey easier to use, and I've taken their feedback to heart.  The most pressing issue was that there wasn't a compiled version of Monterey for Windows for new users to download (Windows is by far the largest target audience according to my Sourceforge download stats).  It has been months since I last looked into fixing the deployment issue that Monterey faced with the switch from Qt 4.X to Qt 5.1.  I sat down tonight after finishing up some math homework and tried getting Monterey to work with the help of QuantumCD.  Here's what happened.

(Quick note: Since I did not have access to another Windows machine, I would rename my QTDIR so that any applications trying to reference it would not be able to find it.)

I tried getting some Hello World Qt apps to "deploy on another Windows machine."  I got that working and QuantumCD verified that it worked on his system, too.  Then, I tried Monterey.  Monterey ran just fine before I renamed my QTDIR.  However after renaming it, Monterey would fail to launch and even fail to display any warning or crash dialogs. That meant that Montery was trying to load up something from my QTDIR.  So I went through and copied mingw48_32/bin into Monterey's directory.  Then changed my QTDIR... and crash.  So that's obviously not all that I have to do.  I kept experimenting, but this time, instead of changing my QTDIR's name, I would rename subfolders in it until Monterey would crash, signifying that Monterey needed something in that directory.

After about 10 minutes of this, I figured out the one folder that Monterey needed that I had never copied over to Monterey's directory before (and NO online tutorials or forum posts said to copy this over). I figured out that QTDIR/mingw48_32/qml/QtQuick.2 was needed for Monterey to run.  After copying that directory into Monterey's directory, I figured out that qtquick2plugin.dll and qmldir were both required. Bam, deployment problem solved!

RootDir
-platforms
    -qwindows.dll
    -qminimal.dll
-QtQuick.2
    -qmldir
    -qtquick2plugin.dll
-icudt51.dll
-icuin51.dll
-icuuc51.dll
-libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
-libstdc++-6.dll
-libwinpthread-1.dll
-Monterey.exe
-Qt5Core.dll
-Qt5Gui.dll
-Qt5Network.dll
-Qt5OpenGL.dll
-Qt5PrintSupport.dll
-Qt5Qml.dll
-Qt5Quick.dll
-Qt5Sensors.dll
-Qt5Sql.dll
-Qt5V8.dll
-Qt5WebKit.dll
-Qt5WebKitWidgets.dll
-Qt5Widgets.dll
-SDL.dll
-sdl-config

I'm happy to have finally fixed that issue!  Now I feel as though work on Monterey can continue this summer.  I won't promise anything before then because I'm kept pretty busy here.  I'm hoping to score a software development internship for this summer, which would be incredibly fun and educational.  The UC system is looking at having us start even later than we already do, which means that I'd have almost a month after my internship to work on Monterey.

When I do work on Monterey this summer I want to focus first on making it more polished, and then adding features.  I want to make it easier to customize (probably using config files) and QuantumCD and I have been talking about making it themeable.  Stay tuned for more information!

You can grab Monterey 3.0.0 here.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

BruinLyfe 1.2.0 - Tutorial added, better screen support

BruinLyfe 1.2.0 has been pushed out to Google Play today.  It brings better support for 7in+ screens and it also brings a first-run tutorial.  There have been plenty of changes over the past 12 hours!  Other updates include improved algorithms for detecting which dining halls are currently open, optimizing JSON parsing code and removing depreciated API calls.

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to download BruinLyfe here!

You can check out the source code here.

Chris Konstad

Recent Developments: College Life and Bruin Lyfe

I haven't really had time to post recently because of college.  I moved in and I have been kept busy with my classes.  After getting here, I found out that someone developed an iOS app called Bruin Life, which had dining hall menus among other information.  Sadly, he never ported it to Android, so a floormate and I decided to fix the situation ourselves.  Over the past few weeks, he and I been developing our own app and it's coming along great!  You can see in the screenshots above that it lists all of the dining hall hours.  When the  user clicks on a time (i.e. De Neve lunch), it opens up another activity that lists the menu for that time period.  More updates will be coming, so stay tuned!

Get it on Google Play!

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

College Update

I've been really busy the past few weeks with college tours and scholarship interviews, and everything is finally coming to a close.  This next year, I will be attending the University of California, Los Angeles for Computer Science.  I can't wait!  Scholarship-wise, I have received a $10,000 scholarship from the UCLA Alumni Association and $10,000 from the Coca-Cola Scholarship Foundation.  I have met more amazing people through both programs than I could have ever imagined and I highly recommend that people apply for both scholarships!

For the Coca-Cola scholarship, I was flown out to Atlanta, Georgia for a weekend of fun and interviews.  There were about 250 of us scholars and we listened to presentations, toured various landmarks and were interviewed by some Coca-Cola Alumni.  It was an amazing program!  I met outstanding high school seniors from all over the country that had started non-profits, worked for defense contractors and fought gang-violence in their communities (just to name a few).  I can't even begin to say how truly honored I am to have met them!

For the UCLA Alumni scholarship, I had to go through a 3 part competition with the other 30-something scholars from around California.  I had to miss the first day, which was team building and games, because I was in Atlanta for my interview, but the second day was a ton of fun!  I met many awesome people and I can't wait to go to school with them next year!

Thanks for stopping by and Go Bruins!

Chris Konstad

School Started and Qt on iOS

Sorry I haven't done too much work on ROV-Suite recently.  I've been pretty busy with school starting, college applications, Robotics team planning (I'm now the team lead) and other programming projects.

This year at school, I'm taking 5 AP courses (Physics, Spanish 4, English, Government, Calculus BC) and so my schedule will be pretty packed.  I won't have too much time to work on as many side projects as I did last year.  Also, I'm the team lead for my Robotics team, which will be a large time commitment.  Finally, the essays involved in college applications and the applications themselves will be a large time-sink.  What I'm trying to say is: don't expect too many updates to ROV-Suite or my other projects this school year.

The good news is that I have successfully written a QML application for iOS (I ported it from my Android/OSX/Windows/Linux code with only slight modifications)!  I'm really excited that the "Qt4iOS" project was far enough along for me to be able to easily use it.  I used Xcode 4.4.1 (on OSX 10.8) and I used the LLVM GCC compiler toolchain.  It works great on my iPhone!  I'll be writing more iOS apps and games in the future (possibly with the help of one of my friends).

I'm going to write a nice tutorial (with screenshots) about developing for iOS with Qt + QML sometime soon.  Thankfully it's pretty easy to get it all setup and working!

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris K