CubeTest 0.9.4 review

CubeTest is a small program that allows you to train your spatial insight. CubeTest is implemented with two different libraries, Tro

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 746K Developer: Jos van den Oever

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CubeTest is a small program that allows you to train your spatial insight.

CubeTest is implemented with two different libraries, Trolltech's Qt library and the Java Swing library. The huge free software project KDE also uses the Qt library which means that this library is available on the majority of GNU/Linux systems.

The library is also freely available for Mac OS X. There are no other dependencies than either Qt or Java. There is no need for an OpenGL library despite the use of 3D objects.

For displaying the 3D objects I've written a number of classes. A square in 3D is, when displayed without perspective, always visible as a trapezoid. Both the Qt and Java libraries allow a square to be sheared to a trapezoid. So with the right amount of shearing, a collection of squares looks like a 3D object.

The classes I wrote use this principle. It's fairly easy to make other 3D objects with these classes and use them as widgets. You can draw on the surface of the cubes as you would on a normal widget. In contrast with OpenGL, the scaling is done smoothly in the Qt classes. It's for example not hard to make a cube with sides that act as buttons as a replacement for boring 2D buttons.

The classes needed for makeing 3D objects are Object and Side. An object consists of an arbitrary number of Sides. It's also a Qt widget that can be manipulated with the mouse. In the downloadable package, there's a small demonstration program called fun which demonstrates the flexibility of the classes Object and Side.

What's New in This Release:
Ported to Qt 4
Two new languages: Italian and Portugese
Cleanup autotools files