Porting Dialcentral to Qt

GrandCentral Dialer

Dialcentral started its life as Grand Central Dialer for the 770.  I got involved by adding support for desktop Linux (which also made possible porting to future versions of Maemo).  Soon after the name change to Dialcentral (out of trademark paranoia) I took over maintaining it.  Google Voice support was added while maintaining Grand Central support as long as possible.  Over time other features were added like texting and group texts.  Eventually I provided an alternate way of interacting with Google Voice through a telepathy connection manager called The One Ring.

DialCentral 1.0.7

This port to Qt has taken longer for many reasons.  The backend has slowly become more compartmentalized over time but the complexity grew faster.  I ended up needing to rewrite everything but the direct wrapper around Google Voice.  Besides some other misc parts of life during this time I was also contacted by a recruiter from a very good company, an opportunity I felt I shouldn't pass up.  My interests have have focused on system programming, programming practices, and software architecture and so I've ended up ignoring algorithms a bit too much.  Their process spread over 2 months which I spent refreshing and expanding my knowledge of algorithms rather than working on Dialcentral.  After a couple trips out seeing the company and the office's city I came to the conclusion that Austin and the company I work for are the place for me to remain for now.  Location was the biggest clincher to me and that was after I researched all of their branch locations and interviewed for one of two I found that I had a chance of liking.

DialCentral 1.2 Beta

I'm still putting some finishing touches on this port.  I'm cautiously testing the waters with releasing this to extras out of concern that Google might break the brittle unofficial API and i have to do an immediate release.  I released a snapshot and have moved on to putting it in extras-devel with dire warnings especially since if an issue arises I might start having the GTK/Qt versions leapfrogging each other (joy of not having PPAs or a stable API).

For me the interesting part is this was my first Qt app that involves threading.  Related to this is that I want to maintain as much common code with The One Ring as possible.  Also with more UI work comes more insight into the better ways of doing things.  I try to keep all of my UIs fairly simple but this is one of the more involved ones.