Andrey Butov Posts

Inspired by Laravel’s $request->old(), I published some middleware for Node.js/Express to make it easier to access POST input from the previous request (if you need to re-populate form fields after a redirect). You can find it on GitHub and via npm.

This solution is for Windows and Mac. It was tested with Qt 5.5.

void setAppToStartAutomatically ( bool startAutomatically )
{
#if defined ( Q_OS_MAC )

    // Remove any existing login entry for this app first, in case there was one
    // from a previous installation, that may be under a different launch path.
    {
        QStringList args;
        args << "-e tell application \"System Events\" to delete login item\"" 
            + macOSXAppBundleName() + "\"";
        
        QProcess::execute("osascript", args);
    }

    // Now install the login item, if needed.
    if ( startAutomatically )
    {
        QStringList args;
        args << "-e tell application \"System Events\" to make login item at end " + 
            "with properties {path:\"" + macOSXAppBundlePath() + "\", hidden:false}";
        
        QProcess::execute("osascript", args);
    }

#elif defined ( Q_OS_WIN )

    QString key = "YouApplicationName";

    QSettings registrySettings(
        "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run", 
        QSettings::NativeFormat);
    
    registrySettings.remove(key);

    if ( startAutomatically ) {
        registrySettings.setValue(key, QString("\"" + windowsAppPath() + "\""));
    }

    registrySettings.sync();

#endif
}


QString macOSXAppBundlePath()
{
#ifdef Q_OS_MAC
    QDir dir = QDir ( QCoreApplication::applicationDirPath() );
    dir.cdUp();
    dir.cdUp();
    QString absolutePath = dir.absolutePath();
    // absolutePath will contain a "/" at the end,
    // but we want the clean path to the .app bundle
    if ( absolutePath.length() > 0 && absolutePath.right(1) == "/" ) {
        absolutePath.chop(1);
    }
    return absolutePath;
#else
    return "";
#endif
}


QString macOSXAppBundleName()
{
#ifdef Q_OS_MAC
    QString bundlePath = macOSXAppBundlePath();
    QFileInfo fileInfo(bundlePath);
    return fileInfo.baseName();
#else
    return "";
#endif
}


QString windowsAppPath()
{
#ifdef Q_OS_WIN
    return QDir::toNativeSeparators(QCoreApplication::applicationFilePath());
#else
    return "";
#endif
}

I open sourced my simple drop-in library for working with Gravatar profile photos in Android.

The code is available on GitHub.

The standard approach to implementing a draggable/movable View in Android is to rely on DragShadowBuilder. For many situations, this would be the easiest approach. However, in some cases, where, for example, you need to modify the view as it is being dragged, DragShadowBuilder won’t do, as it’s just not flexible enough.

As part of a larger project, I created an alternate implementation of a draggable View, without the dependency on DragShadowBuilder. With this approach you have full access to the view being dragged (actually, the cached Bitmap image of the view), and, as such, the view can be modified while moving.

The code is available on GitHub.

In 2010, I wrote a utility for Antair that allowed us to easily view the email headers of any email in the BlackBerry inbox.

The application integrated nicely with the BlackBerry inbox, making it really simple to view the headers of any incoming email message.

We released the application as a free app shortly thereafter. From what I heard, quite a few system administrators have found a use for it.

Today, I cleaned up the code a bit, and released the project as open source.