How To Read EXIF Orientation From JPEG in Qt 4.8.5

For many Qt lovers out there who might want to use third-party EXIF parsing library with their Qt apps, it may prove difficult unless you know what you’re doing. If you’re a hobbyist like me, man, it’s just tough. But there are free EXIF parsers out there, and it might take a little elbow grease to make it work with Qt. In my case, I put together a very simple and basic image viewer that I thought users might appreciate if it auto-rotated any images that contained EXIF metadata such as orientation. In smartphones and DSLRs, there is usually a sensor that records which orientation the picture was taken in. So when you view the photo without orientation applied, it might be a minor nuisance having to manually rotate it. That’s where you come in as software developer and take care of it for the end-user. Continue reading “How To Read EXIF Orientation From JPEG in Qt 4.8.5”

Fixing Windows 10 Aspect Ratio Scaling Problem For Lower Resolution Display

You may notice if you’re still deploying applications using resolutions less than 800x600x72dpi on Windows 10 that the autoscaling for the aspect ratio might be wonky. That’s because all these new fancy operating systems are trying to cater to ultra high resolution/density screens these days, and if you’re building an old-fashion 2D game engine that doesn’t require too much screen resolution, the final output might be thrown off a bit. Sometimes it’s just the graphics card, but in Windows 10 case, it seems it’s built into the operating system. Anyway, this is how I “fixed” it.

Example of incorrect aspect ratio in Windows 10 auto-scaling fullscreen
Example of incorrect aspect ratio in Windows 10 auto-scaling fullscreen

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Hello World with QPainter

This is the most basic of basic tutorials when it comes to computer programming. It is virtually done to death. The basic idea is for you as the programmer to be able to send a message to the computer and have it return the message to you as output. Originally, this would be done via command-line or command-prompt, a scary black void of an interface. So in this case, I’ll show you how to actually engage the user by hooking into the default GUI mainWindow. Continue reading “Hello World with QPainter”