I was beginning to think this day would never come. I am very glad it did. This latest version of rbChron is actually a total rewrite. As I said in an earlier news post, I had started with rbChron 2.0 in porting to PyQt. At the time PyQt was at version 3. "No problem!", I thought. "I'll just port to PyQt and then when I'm done with that, I'll go ahead and work on improving the design." Alas, that was not to be. Although I got the alpha done, the writing was already on the wall. QT4 was on the horizon and it would break backward compatibility with QT3. KDE was going to build on this version with their new desktop. KDevelop, my favorite IDE, would be following suit, and for icing on the cake, Python was going to go to version 3. Of course, version 3 was going to break backward compatibility as well. In other words, every last piece of software that rbChron depended on was about to undergo a major overhaul at pretty much the same time. I limped along with the Alpha release until most of my tools were at least usable again.
By the time I could work on rbChron with a stable version of PyQT4 I realised that , if I'm going to have to deal with breakage again anyway, I might as well redesign the whole thing and save myself some time. This latest version is the result. It makes actual use of the signals and slots mechanism that makes QT such a dream to use. In the process, rbChron came out some 400 lines of code lighter. I'm really happy with the way things have turned out and I'm looking forward to working with it as my understanding of both Python and QT continues to grow.
With this version, as was true with the alpha release, there isn't any real change with regard to features. The look is much improved over version 1.8 and there is actually a handbook that can be accessed from the help menu. Another noticeable difference is the fact that rbChron 3.0 actually uses its program icon in the title bar and in the "about rbChron" dialog. This gives it a more complete feel, at least to me anyway. Long time users of the 1.8 version should see a noticeable difference in look and feel, hopefully for the better. One caveat that may or may not affect some users is the fact that the current version does not save its state on exit. I'm debating on whether or not to bring it back. If anyone has become dependent on that little feature, please drop me a note. Another notable difference is the fact that the button labels are not colorized. QT4 has changed the way these labels are to be modified. To add color there needs to be a stylesheet defined. I haven't looked into this yet. I might bring this back as well if the urge hits me.
Now that I have a working QT4 version of rbChron, I'm going to get back to incremental improvements. I plan on keeping the project page updated from now on with a list of planned improvements. You can download rbChron in the usual place. For a quick peek at the screenshots, have a look here.
