Another weekend, another release! This one is special. You may remember a few years ago I created a burger game for Android: Burger Party. At that time I had plans to generate some revenue through this game. After investigating the different revenue models, I sadly concluded I would have to include ads.

That did not work out (surprise!): at its peak Burger Party reached a few thousand installations, which generated a meager $30 of revenue. I guess the reasons for this failure was that:

1. There were not enough ads to make it work: I decided against permanent banners so the game only displayed interstitials between levels, and no more than one ad every two minutes,
2. It did not reach enough installations, marketing is not my forte.

I also never felt comfortable with the idea of one my personal projects being ad-based and proprietary. I kept telling myself I should remove the ads and release a new version of Burger Party as free software, but I never got around to do it...

Here is another release for the release month! This time it's a new release of Pixel Wheels. This one has been a long time coming: version 0.10.0 got released in September.

Continuing on this release month idea started last week, here is a release of another project. Today is the first release of qpropgen, a tool to generate QML-friendly QObject-based C++ classes from class definition files.

December just started, and this year I want to try to do something a bit similar to advent calendars: make a new release of one of my (too) many projects every weekend! This release month begins with the release of Doxyqml 0.5.0, an input filter to let you document your QML code using Doxygen.

If you have been wondering about the lack of progress on Pixel Wheels, it's partly because last month I participated again to Inktober, the yearly event where you have to produce one drawing a day every day during October.

The Inktober site provides word lists for each day, you don't have to use them, but I find having a word everyday helps getting started.

Like last year, I also picked a recurring theme. This year it was robots.

Now that I am back from holidays (and from Akademy, which was awesome!), it's time to release a new version of Pixel Wheels!

Here are the major changes coming with this release.

So after a (too long) break, I am going back to Akademy this year! Having been away from KDE work for a while now, this will be the first time I attend the conference as a user. It's going to be interesting to see how this feels. In any case, I am looking forward to the sessions and to catching up with old friends.

This took way too long, but I finally found the time to release PixelWheels 0.9.0. I spent most of my time on improving input handling code to add gamepad support, especially the UI part. Gamepad support while racing pretty much worked out of the box after that.

When you write code in QML, ListModel is a handy class to quickly populate a list with data. It has a serious limitation though: the values of its elements cannot be the result of a function. This means you cannot write this:

import QtQuick 2.9
import QtQuick.Window 2.2
Window {
    visible: true
    ListModel {
        id: speedModel
        ListElement {
            name: "Turtle"
            speed: slowSpeed()
        }
        ListElement {
            name: "Rabbit"
            speed: highSpeed()
        }
    }
    Column {
        Repeater {
            model: speedModel
            Text {
                text: model.name + " " + model.speed
            }
        }
    }
    function slowSpeed() {
        return 12;
    }
    function highSpeed() {
        return 42;
    }
}

Running this will fail with that error message: "ListElement: cannot use script for property value".

So you want to change the Java package name of your Android project, but you've heard that you won't be able to push updates to Google Play if you do so? That's almost true.