Porting ejpi from GTK t Qt

"e**(j * pi) + 1 = 0" is the more complete name of this project.  Throwing the "j" in their might be confusing but blame that on my engineering background.  Why yes, I love that fact that Python follows the EE notation over the Mathematical notation.

The idea for ejpi was born from reading a complaint on planet.gnome.org about how computer calculators overly mimic handheld calculators much to their detriment.  On a computer there are a lot more ways to interact with a program than a device with a one-line display and a fixed set of hardware buttons.

So ejpi is designed as an RPN calculator that has an interactive history.  You can delete item and duplicate items.  With a one-line calculator it is easy to forget where you are in a multistep calculation, so ejpi shows you not just the result but the equation that got you there.

A 4" device (n8x0) is limited on what all you can put on the screen and shrinking it down to 3.5" (n900) makes it even harder.  Making matters worse is that even if the device has a qwerty keyboard (n800 doesn't) its not well suited for math.  So I chose to experiment with pie-menus as the keyboard.  Typical pie-menus behave more like a context menu and have the middle of the pie be cancel.  I changed this up a bit to mimic my favorite keyboard for the Palm, MessagEase.  The pies are buttons that if you just click will perform the center's operation.  If you click-drag the pie will popup and then release in the direction of another symbol for it to perform that operation. 

There is a trade-off in how much of the pie's contents the button shows.  If you show too much then it is cluttered.  If you show too little then the user has to explore every button to know what operations are supported and where.

Sadly on Maemo devices, the performance of the pie menus is not what I would like which makes this more of a toy program.  I actually use the HP42 clone more than my own calculator

Unlike when I blogged about Gonvert, I am still working on the ejpi port.  I've got all the basic functionality working except switching keyboards.  I also plan on adding rotation support, directly editing history, some UI tweaks, and maybe one or two other things that crop up.  If the performance of the pies is better I might add an algebraic entry mode to make ejpi more widely appealing.

So far I plan to write about my experience in writing custom widgets for Qt, handling of dynamic layouts, and the various tree models.  We'll see what is left by the time I am finished.