BT: Adjust the colliding mice example to work with coalesced updates.

It seems that Cocoa is much more strict about coalesced updates than
Carbon ever was. The upshot of this is that some examples that "worked"
after a fashion in Carbon, do not exhibit good frame rates with Cocoa.

The reason why is that apparently Cocoa will decide to flush to the
screen every time a timer fires. If you have a lot of timers that are
all dependent on doing on update to the screen, you will get undesirable
effects.

Thankfully, it is possible to adjust the examples to follow best
practices and get a good result. So, we now only do the animation once
using QGraphicsScene::advance(). We are also able to make the mice less
heavy (no QObject subclass). I've updated the docs and someone on the
doc team has kindly volunteered to go through them.

Reviewed-by: Andreas

1 files changed, 21 insertions, 18 deletions

diff --git a/doc/src/examples/collidingmice-example.qdoc b/doc/src/examples/collidingmice-example.qdoc
index 7ea2ca2..657a204 100644
--- a/doc/src/examples/collidingmice-example.qdoc
+++ b/doc/src/examples/collidingmice-example.qdoc
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@
 
     \section1 Mouse Class Definition
 
-    The \c mouse class inherits both QObject and QGraphicsItem. The
+    The \c mouse class inherits from QGraphicsItem. The
     QGraphicsItem class is the base class for all graphical items in
     the Graphics View framework, and provides a light-weight
     foundation for writing your own custom items.
@@ -78,14 +78,11 @@
     {QGraphicsItem::}{boundingRect()}, which returns an estimate of
     the area painted by the item, and \l {QGraphicsItem::}{paint()},
     which implements the actual painting. In addition, we reimplement
-    the \l {QGraphicsItem::}{shape()} function to return an accurate
+    the \l {QGraphicsItem::}{shape()} and \l {QGraphicsItem::}{advance()}.
+    We reimplement \l {QGraphicsItem::}{shape()} to return an accurate
     shape of our mouse item; the default implementation simply returns
-    the item's bounding rectangle.
-
-    The rationale for deriving from QObject in addition to
-    QGraphicsItem is to be able to animate our items by reimplementing
-    QObject's \l {QObject::}{timerEvent()} function and use
-    QObject::startTimer() to generate timer events.
+    the item's bounding rectangle. We reimplement \l {QGraphicsItem::}{advance()}
+    to handle the animation so it all happens on one update.
 
     \section1 Mouse Class Definition
 
@@ -105,19 +102,18 @@
     calling the item's \l {QGraphicsItem::rotate()}{rotate()} function
     we alter the direction in which the mouse will start moving.
 
-    In the end we call QObject's \l {QObject::}{startTimer()}
-    function, emitting a timer event every 1000/33 millisecond. This
-    enables us to animate our mouse item using our reimplementation of
-    the \l {QObject::}{timerEvent()} function; whenever a mouse
-    receives a timer event it will trigger \l
-    {QObject::}{timerEvent()}:
-
+	When the QGraphicsScene decides to advance the scene a frame it will call 
+	QGraphicsItem::advance() on each of the items. This enables us to animate
+	our mouse using our reimplementation of the advance() function.
+	
     \snippet examples/graphicsview/collidingmice/mouse.cpp 4
     \snippet examples/graphicsview/collidingmice/mouse.cpp 5
     \snippet examples/graphicsview/collidingmice/mouse.cpp 6
 
-    First we ensure that the mice stays within a circle with a radius
-    of 150 pixels.
+    First, we don't bother doing any advance if the step is 0 since we want to our advance in 
+	the actual advance (advance() is called twice, once with step == 0 indicating that items 
+	are about to advance and with step == 1 for the actual advance). We also ensure that the 
+	mice stays within a circle with a radius of 150 pixels.
 
     Note the \l {QGraphicsItem::mapFromScene()}{mapFromScene()}
     function provided by QGraphicsItem. This function maps a position
@@ -275,5 +271,12 @@
     In the end, we set the application window's title and size before
     we enter the main event loop using the QApplication::exec()
     function.
-*/
 
+	Finally, we create a QTimer and connect its timeout() signal to the advance()
+	slot of the scene. Every time the timer fires, the scene will advance one frame.
+	We then tell the timer to fire every 1000/33 millisecond. This will 
+	give us a frame rate of 30 frames a second, which is fast enough for most animations. 
+	Doing the animation with a single timer connect to advance the scene ensures that all the 
+	mice are moved at one point and, more importantly, only one update is sent to the screen 
+	after all the mice have moved.
+*/
\ No newline at end of file