Submitted by Kristian Rietveld blogs what to expect on GTK 2.10+ e.g. offscreen widgets, faster dialogs and more. Meanwhile, GTK+ stable version 2.8.6 was released with various bug fixes.
What’s Coming on GTK+ 2.10
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I wish they’d just start work on version 3!
I wish they’d just start work on version 3!
Why? The only reason for a version 3 is because you’re breaking compatibility with 2. And that’s something you do because 2 is holding you back.
Is there anything that’s preventing new features from being added to 2, that makes you want them to break compatibility?
When Project Ridley is done, I believe that is when it will become 3.0.
Project Ridley can actually be done right now, without needing to break binary compatibility. All Ridley is, is a merging of a number of different projects under one roof; those who need compatibility, simply keep the seperate libraries going, whilst those who embrace the new features will simply have to say, “requires GTK 2.10 or later”
It’s really sick, that people complain about GTK+ keeping it’s major version number that long, instead of recognizing that it obviously is some achievment to extend GTK+ but keep it source and binary compatible for more that 42 months now. This “two” in front of GTK’s version number expresses nothing but compatiblitly. From a developers point of view quite alot as been improved since 2.0.
Well, but fortunatly[?] the GTK+ crew realized, that stability and maturity makes bad marketing: Not enough fancy improvements to announce. So they decided to announce GTK+ 3.0 as soon as Project Ridley is finished. Oddly enough this release number will be a marketing gag only.
some people do a great job in keeping GTK+
Definitely. For one, the filechooserbutton has saved me quite a bit of time. No mucking about with making a filechooser dialog, a button, and a text widget; I just throw that in and boom; an hour of work and a mess of code eliminated! Of course, I could care less about the hour, it was the mess to clean up later I didn’t want!
This looks nice
http://people.redhat.com/alexl/files/offscreen3.html
Yep, and I imagine where it could be used first. Not rotating, but cairo scaling.
People were always bugging Gimp people that toolbox widgets are too large. If I understand correctly, zoom should be appliable just as rotation, which means toolbox could automaticaly just scale down everything inside but without any problem with its current theme (mini gtk was now handled as separate part of .gtkrc and very very buggy).
but will there be a new standard gtk rant for osnews, or will people still complain that it is slow
Yeah! GTK is so damn slow! Before adding features they should just make it fast. TWM is sooo much faster. GTK and GNome are bloated and suck it! Hard!
You’ve got to be kidding me. Of course TWM is faster than Gnome! It has no features! And anyway BASH is a LOT faster than TWM…
Is there any GTK 2.8.x installer for Windows avaible? The last one I can find is from 2.6.9 version. Any other? even unstable ones? I would like to check how is the performance using Cairo in Windows as it’s now…
No, just alot of win32 folders containing ZIP files spread all over http://ftp.gtk.org and http://ftp.gnome.org.
work on improving GTK so it isn’t a gigantic steaming pile — I must give them points though, even the fumes are too slow for me to notice them while I’m walking by.
Qt ftw.
Every month Gnome lose many users who are sick of that badly framework and those applications featureless.
Kde will be the true Linux desktop.
The most I read trolls like the most I dislike KDE.
The trolls have what to do with KDE, again?
Really, disliking a project because of misguided trolls on the internet is very silly.
Let’s keep this orderly, people. Trolls about GTK being slow, please step to the right. Trolls about Gnome in general, please step to the left. Trolls about other topics, please take a number.
What about fast path for western fonts? I’m sure that a great deal of the “speed” issues with GTK would be lost if this were done.
Ultra fast chooser sounds cool though…
It would be cool to have a build time option to make pango only deal with western fonts. I mean, that’s all I’m gonna deal with anyway… I wouldn’t do it in a distro release, but I’d rebuild on my home machine!
At lease gnome gets the usability correct, what can be more simple than a panel and menu at the top. Can anyone answer me why on earth do KDE/Windows put the panel and menu on the bottem left?, because thats just wrong.
Can you please fix the filechooserbutton too? Everytime I add it to a window, the window takes <forever> to load up and I hear tons of disk churning… Of course, the second time I load it it’s massively better.
But the faster filechooser loads will be a VERY welcome change; especially since I massively preferred the old file chooser anyway!
Speaking of, screw bookmarks: Give us keyboard usability. I want to be able to type my way through a file selector.
Another anoying thing is that when you try overwrite a file, it asks you are you sure, if you click no instead of falling back to the file save dialog it just closes. That really sucks.
The filechooserbutton will benefit from the filechooser work, as suprise suprise, it actually creates a filechooser.
GTK should include a standard set of audio widgets such as, jog wheels and knobs.
No it shouldn’t, they are specialised widgets and would only bloat it. Such widgets should belong to gstreamer, where they actually make sense.
I hope they change the file browsing / opening / saving dialog.
One of the few GTK-based apps I use is Firefox and I absolutely hate the current GTK file browser /open/save dialog.
Firefox doesn’t use the standard open/save dialog – it implements it’s own in 1.0.x versions of Firefox.
Are you saying you prefer the custom firefox dialog, or are you confusing the custom dialog with the standard one?
On some distros Firefox uses the GTK file selector and not its own. Personally I don’t like the file selector, I think its awful, though the GTK apps I use are ok.
The proposition that Gnome is dying is idiotic, especially in a GTK thread since Gnome != GTK. So lets rephrase that as the question, is GTK dying? The obvious answer is no. You have a thriving community around it that is about as large as the QT based FOSS community. That’s not dying to me. Then you have SWT, more apps are being developed with it, who knows maybe java programs based on SWT will become significant on the Linux desktop, if they do they will integrate nicely with Gnome. Again, that’s not dying. Then there is wxWidgets and there are lots of apps, FOSS apps, based on it. I’ve found a statistic on freshmeat per toolkit and the wx based apps far outnumbered those written for QT/KDE and GTK/Gnome and of course the Linux version sits on top of GTK and integrates nicely into Gnome. I wouldn’t call this dying, I would call this thriving, and before anybody starts with KDE is dying, let me ask you, how can you consider a large, self-sufficient and growing community as dying?
I’d say that GTK is actually replacing Motif, which was once the stable developing tool for UNIX; as features are added, speed is improved, the need to maintain old motif legacy code will be moot.
-1
Interesting, and on what basis was that made? the fact that a person makes a remotely positive comment about GTK.
Please, OSNews staff, when a person puts a point or takes one, their name should be registered against the comment to show to all the community who added/subtracted points – maybe then people would think twice before acting like a dickhead.
Well, I have to give GTK some credit.
Even though it is a huge steaming pile, even the fumes are so slow that I have the luxury of not noticing it’s stench as I walk by or even on my system.
And when I do, in a feat impossible to explain through modern sciences, it ceases to exsist. It crashes.
You can use the keyboard to navigate within the file selector. Just start typing! Typing activates a search completion widget that aids you in navigating through files and folders. It also supports tab completion! I think the file selector is well designed and it will only get better.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200510/s1475017.htm
Here you go: the latest GTK+ for Windows that I know of. It’s a shame that the 2.8.x series isn’t available on this platform though… 🙁
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gaim/gtk-runtime-2.6.10-rev-a.ex…
Wrong, latest GTK+ for windows is 2.8.4, runs nice here together with Gimp 2.3.4 (the new siox tool is really great) have a search on SourceForce.net or on the gimp ftp site
I _greatly_ appreciate the offscreen stuff, because it happens to perfectly suit the needs of a project I will have to tackle. The specific application (with a MacApp legacy) relies on printing partially reformatted dialog contents for documentation of its use, and this looked _hard_ and like a big roadblock until now. With the new features it should be either direct-to-print via cairo (haven’t looked at the source yet) or at least pixmap-to-print. So YAY! for me and my specific needs.
However, I doubt this is very interesting to most. And as Nautilus maintainer, IMO, Alex should’ve focused on bringing that up to standards first. It’s still so _abysmally_ slow with even a low 4-figure number of files per folder that it’s not funny. 2.12.0 still takes in the order of 10 seconds on a 2GHz AMD machine. Worse, when this combines with the new spring-loaded-foldout on a d-n-d copy, it forces desperation upon the user because s/he not just can’t continue, but has to hold down the mouse button to avoid dropping the files somewhere in nirvana.
I use Gnome for 95% of my daily work, but in this case it’s actually faster to load the whole Qt-lib-chain, navigate to the given folder, and _still_ have Konqueror not just run circles around it, but de-class Nautilus into the realm of the ridiculous. Right down there with the 10.0.0-Finder.
Printing is also absent, so there’s a lot to do.
Now, folks, the question arises “It’s FLOSS, so why don’t you scratch your itch and code it yourself?”. I actually might have considered delving a bit into Nautilus and read a bit of the mailing list. It seems to be that Alex is rather quick at patch rejections with either a “this won’t work” or a “this is not how i like it” attitude rather than a somewhat more constructive approach – so at least some efforts will be lost in friction. The first reason likely comes from bad maintainability of the code base, but then I’d say it’s his task to bring it into shape for larger participation. Maintaining such a core component IMO brings a bit more responsibility than happily hacking along as a part time job besides making GTK offscreen-happy.
Indeed. Good to see them move GTK6 forward. 🙂
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=121075&packag…