[Kde-finance-apps] Announcing: KNameNeeded

[Brian Cappello]

Hi everybody :)

My name is Brian, and I'm a just-graduated Electrical Engineering student
from the University of Vermont, USA. I've been a really big KDE/FOSS fan for
quite some time now, but I never really knew how to get involved beyond
supporting users on forums and whatnot, so this will hopefully become my
first real attempt at changing that...

For about 7 months now I've been (time permitting) cranking away on a KDE
application for stock charting and technical analysis (using GraphicsView,
TA-LIB, and (for now) free data from Yahoo). Unfortunately, it's still *
*many** months away from me being satisfied enough with it for an initial
public Alpha release, let alone a "trustable" 0.1 - please don't get *any*
hopes up - but it seemed appropriate to at the very minimum give you guys a
heads up to the code's existence. If there's anything I can do to help with
Alkimia or something else, I'm not quite sure of how much help I could be or
where/how to begin, but if it's related to the financial markets (or
usability) I'm probably at least interested in trying my hand at it... Just
say the word. :)

This is will be my first-ever C++/KDE/out-of-the-classroom program. As it
stands the code is missing a *ton *of basic-required-functionality, what
exists is riddled with bugs, the interface is
*ridiculously*developer-oriented (see attached), I'm pretty sure it
still leaks memory,
the whole thing is single-process *and* single-threaded (argh UI-blocking
KIO::NetAccess!), and to top it all off, the code just plain sucks. I've
tried my best to at least iron out all (most) of the crashes, what's there
more-or-less "works", but for now we're still talking about the *epitome* of
Crap Software. (For instance, prices and related math all use doubles(!),
indicators and their parameters currently must be hard-coded until I can
finish wrestling with TA-LIB's abstract interface, session management and
KConfig are currently non-existent, and the entire chart should probably be
rewritten using GraphipcsWidgets and, where possible, non-manual layouts.
The TODO list is just sky high, lol.) Literally everything about the code is
under active development and is subject to drastic changes as I keep
learning new and better ways to do things.

To be honest, this project was originally started strictly as a learning
playground to better understand the design/usability/human-factors
capabilities of the Qt/KDE APIs, as well as just getting comfortable with
how "many-ish" objects interact. But, after this much time I've realized
that I'm definitely sucked into this for the long-haul. [Programming is,
IMO, much better than EE! And, maybe some day *way* off in my distant
(probably crazy) dreams, I'll even be able to get some form of profitable
systematic trading working... First things first, though, and there are
*years* worth of those! ;] If anybody is interested in checking out this
ugliness, with some helping pointers, I'll happily put the code up on Git.

Well, I guess that's my introduction. I look forward to working with
everybody!  :D
Brian






PS
If any (awesome) peoples happen to be interested in helping out with
development, I will more than gladly put together some high-level
documentation and diagrams so it's easier to find your way around and see
how all the various classes interact (the code itself is, hopefully, at
least somewhat low-level commented. Pointers for improvement are welcomed :)
There's opportunity for everything from small fixes to improving/fixing the
implementation of various algorithms to designing/implementing a threaded
DataManager and beyond... [I'm one of those weirdos who *prefers* UI
programming (though I'm kinda terrible at making things do what I really
want), so please don't hesitate with regards to asking about doing any of
"the cool stuff." :]  (Or UI stuff, for that matter...)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-finance-apps/attachments/20100520/7931b653/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: stockchart_pic_5.20.10.png
Type: image/png
Size: 113971 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-finance-apps/attachments/20100520/7931b653/attachment-0001.png