Qt 5.3: The folks at Digia seem to be keeping the Qt development pace up, and not forgetting to take a breather and getting the stability story right. The latest release, Qt 5.3 appears to be one of those breather releases with lots of fixes for the desktop platforms and a supported beta for the Windows 8 Runtime. There’s some new additions too; a QtQuickWidget lets Qt Quick UIs be embedded into older Qt Widget based applications for a smoother transition between the old to new development style and there’s now WebSockets support for plugging into more web applications. You’ll find all the open source tools and downloads on the Qt Project website.
Os.js: Every generation is doomed to reinvent the previous generation and here we have OS.js which looks to implement an entire desktop environment, within the browser, in JavaScript. Thats not to say its not interesting as the idea of having a desktop to your cloud isn’t without merit, especially so if the desktop is portable. There’s already a lot in the alpha version of the platform and it seems way more developed than similar projects I’ve encountered in the past. Window and file management, a GUI library, multi-user support, theming and applications such as Draw, Preview, Textpad and Writer make this a project worth looking at. There’s a demo online too and its all under what appears to be a BSD 2-clause licence.
Papilio:Just turning up on my radar, and I’m late to the party, is Papilio, a single board controller which looks like a turboed up Arduino but at its heart is not an Atmel chip but an FPGA chip. That FPGA can be configured with a soft clone of the AtMega chips and driven with the Arduino IDE or it can run a “ZPUino” configuration which works like an “Arduino on steroids” at 100Mhz.
The compatibility with Arduino isn’t the driver for the project though, its more of a stepping stone into FPGA programming. Videos on the site show the Papilo programmed to emulate the Pacman and Frogger motherboards with FPGA emulations of Z80s and other classic CPUs or getting the Papilo to emulate the SID chip from the Commodore 64. The chip, on the Pro version at least, is a Xilinx Spartan 6 LX FPGA - There’s a couple of boards and the UK supplier, SK Pang, offers the newer Pro for £80 inc VAT (and a slightly older, cheaper Paplio One 500K for around £65). A list of other regional distributors is also availble.
There’s also an expansions, such as the LogicStart MegaWing for getting into FPGA/VHDL development, the Arcade MegaWing for game emulation, the Retrocade MegaWing for audio/midi work and [and numerous single purpose “wings. It looks like there’s already a whole ecosystem for the budding FPGA hacker to dive into.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog