Elegant Invention Blog

Still alive! Another project has kept me very busy as of late.. One that will avoid the undesirable situation of trying to evolve beyond the need to eat.

I’ve been taking a few steps back lately on eiCAD: the shape system was originally designed to be extremely flexible and still fairly simple. As I began moving to C++ using Qt, I changed it around a bit to be less flexible, but more tuned to work with Qt’s built-in graphics handling classes. This made life easier for a lot of things, but as I tried to implement wires (nets / traces / connections / …) — pictured above — I ran into a serious conflict of interest with Qt’s handling of selecting and moving QGraphicsItems. Overriding some default implementations makes everything work in harmony.

P.S. Don’t take this as a posting against Qt — quite the contrary! Qt has made life easy on this project, and as with any project you will probably run into a situation where your tools don’t quite fit the bill. The fun part is the challenge of either changing the tools, or the design, to meet the same goals.