Monday 17 January 2011

A desktop log viewer

I’ve created a simple desktop application which is a viewer for viewing logging records sent from applications via the SocketHandler and DatagramHandler. It’s early days and the viewer is fairly simple, so I’ve created a screencast so that I can get some feedback on the user interface before spending too much more time on it. If people think it will be useful, I can release it under a 3-clause BSD license.

I realize that web interfaces are all the rage, but it took me less time to produce this desktop app using PyQt than an equivalent web application would have.

I developed this on Ubuntu Maverick using the bundled versions of Qt and PyQt, and it seems pretty stable. With older versions of Qt/PyQt (e.g. the versions bundled with Ubuntu Karmic and earlier) I have had segfaults with the identical code - I'm not sure where the problem is.

The code also works with a recent version of PyQt on Windows 7.

The screencast is around 3 minutes long.

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I’d be grateful for any feedback about the user interface. I know it’s not especially innovative but then it’s doing a fairly simple job :-)