Here’s a little sneak preview of the central thing the next release brings:

A major refactoring of the axis rect sytem now allows for much more flexible plots, with basically all the layout possibilities you already know from QWidgets and QLayout. All inside one QCustomPlot instance. You can also have multiple axes per side in one axis rect, when you really need to fit all the data you’ve got into one plot.

Can’t say when the release is going to be finished yet, there still is lots of work to do. After all, it’s going to be 1.0.0, so I’d better be careful . In case you’re wondering, I will use the semantic versioning scheme. That means major versions change the public interface in a backward-incompatible manner, minor versions change the library without breaking backward compatibility and the rightmost number is for patch releases.

Sleep tight!

Yesterday night I finally finished the new QCustomPlot release which introduces, as promised, items!

You know, items, like arrows, text labels, rectangles, straight lines etc. to decorate the plot and emphasize or explain data. To introduce them, a short section was added to the online wlcw tutorial. As always, you’ll get the most useful information from the documentation and the example codes. The base class QCPAbstractItem is a good starting point.

Although Items are the big addition in this release, there are plenty of other new things worth mentioning:

• Pretty much all visible objects on the plot are now “Layerables” and can be placed on layers (see QCPLayer docs). This gives you a very convenient way to control the rendering order in the plot and organize your objects.
• The antialiasing is not controlled centralized for all objects of a category anymore, but each object has its own setAntialiased function. The old function setAntialiasedElements can now be used to override the individual settings.
• In Qt 4.7 the drawing is now absolutely pixel precise due to a smart QPainter subclass that works around some Qt bugs. Of course this is most noticeable when having antialiased and non-antialiased objects side by side that need to line up (like error bars and scatter points). Unfortunately Qt 4.8 is very broken in this respect, so much that a workaround isn’t possible.
• Added more possibilities to improve performance. You may now specify that antialiasing is disabled while dragging axis ranges to improve responsiveness. Further the plotting hint phFastPolylines allows increasing the performance of graphs when they use solid lines and plot performance is more important than line-joint quality.
• Shared library compilation and usage is now possible without additional work necessary. See the sharedlib package in the download section which demonstrates this, and the setup section in the online wlcw tutorial.

For a detailed listing of what has changed, what bugs were fixed and what code-compatibility issues may arise, see the changenotes.

The Qt plotting widget QCustomPlot now offers user interactions that go beyond range dragging: object selection and specific click signal emission for graphs, axes, legend, etc.! Additionally to the documentation (and the “user interactions” section of the website-tutorial), the new interactions-example in the QCustomPlot package explains this new feature.

Of course, a few minor changes here and there and a few bugfixes have made it into the release, too, see the changenotes for details.

The next release will probably finally include anchorable objects such as text/images/shapes/arrows. Exciting.

Need…sleep…

Phew, it’s done.

Most significant new features:
Plottable-interface extends graph-interface and allows for future extension. In line with that come three new plot capabilities: Parametric curves, Bars and Statistical Box Plots. See the new section in the tutorial (above download section) and the documentation.
Further, Axes are now reversable (Yay!)

Apart from that, the documentation was extended quite a bit. With the touched up main page, the new class descriptions and of course the member documentation, one should be able to learn using QCustomPlot even without reading the tutorial on WorksLikeClockwork.com.

Off to bed .

I needed a modern and secure hash, so I went over to NIST and looked, how the competition’s going. And hey, they’re in the final round, so I only had to pick one among five candidates. I chose Grøstl. Not because my infallible cryptography wisdom told me it’s the best one, but because I liked the play on words. (I’m proud I immediately got it.)

That was a few months ago. Now that I have this website, I thought maybe somebody could also use a modern hash function in Qt. But then it’s only that one function which I chose arbitrarily… So I wrote four more wrapper classes for all of them. And here they are.

A very big thanks goes out to Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, Raphael C.-W. Phan, Søren Steffen Thomsen, Martin Schläffer, Christian Rechberger, Florian Mendel, Krystian Matusiewicz, Lars R. Knudsen, Praveen Gauravaram, Hongjun Wu, Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, Gilles Van Assche, Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Bruce Schneier, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas and Jesse Walker, in no particular order, for their hard work on the hash algorithms and for choosing minimum personal profit and maximum benefit for the public by putting the code under no proprietary license, but making it public domain. Chapeau!

I’ve registered the domain yesterday and linked it to my webspace. Since I had a sandbox-WordPress running for about a week while I constructed the theme and learned how to use WordPress, the actual installation and configuration only took two or three hours today, including E-mail setup and database setup. WordPress is some nice piece of software. Hacking its code is really easy and fun.
Never again am I going to write a website from scratch.

I’ll be posting all the content I have in the queue and which sparked this website in the next days and weeks.