Presenter assists

I was a volunteer at EclipseCon 2013. One of the task consists to help the speaker keep on time, by displaying cardboards showing the remaining time of the session. For fun, I and François Rajotte made a small QML app for that purpose (and most of all to experiment with QML). The app is based on a timer, with color transition when remaining time goes under some threshold. It is really hacky, but it works!

Usage:

• Start or reset the timer: click anywhere in the window
• Full screen: press "F"
• Quit: press "Q"

We definitely should be able to set the start time (not all sessions have the same length) and the list of threshold with custom colors should be customizable. It requires an additional UI component, and those settings should be saved.

As for QML, it's quite cool. The rendering is flicker free and it's quite easy to make animations. We had one issue with keyboard events. We extended a QAction and overloaded the method eventFilter to get key events. The problem is the method always returned "true", as if we should stop forwarding the event to other event filters. It turns out that it was preventing QML to behave properly, because its handler runs after our own. Be aware!

The code is on github: https://github.com/giraldeau/presenter-assists