GTK+ Archive

Announcing: Project Ridley

  Submitted by Rahul GTK+ 56 Comments
"The primary goal of Project Ridley is to cut down on the number of problem libraries that are part of the GNOME platform. We propose to do this by moving functionality into GTK+, wherever it makes sense. These libraries are generally small, undermaintained, and buggy."
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GnomeFiles.org One Year Old

GTK+ 45 Comments
GnomeFiles.org, the software repository for applications using the multi-platform toolkit GTK+, is now one year old. During that time 840 applications were posted and 240,000+ file downloads occured. The site now enjoys about 20,000 pageviews daily on average (which was our initial goal). A few more statistics for the curious: 69% of GnomeFiles' visitors are using Linux and it was a surprise for us that only 1.2% are using a *BSD. Regarding browsers, Firefox dominates with 71% while Gnome's Epiphany scores a 5% with IE barely at 6%. We would like to thank our loyal GnomeFiles visitors for their support. Please leave a comment if you would like to see a new feature on GnomeFiles.org.
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Extending GTK+’s Visual Flexibility

GTK+ 81 Comments
"To make the desktop look really nice, you want the ability to theme a window (or sub-component thereof) as a whole. This could mean graphics that span multiple widgets, it could mean moving widgets around, it could mean changing the spacing between widgets, etc. To address this, I believe we'd need to rework GTK+ a fair bit" says Red Hat's Havoc Pennington.
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GTK+ Goes Cairo; Owen Taylor on X/Cairo/GTK+ Integration

GTK+ 72 Comments
GTK+ is now the first major toolkit to depend on the Cairo vector graphics library which is designed to provide high-quality display and print output. Cairo will add 3 more dependencies to GTK: itself, glitz and libpixman (after atk, Pango, Glib, FontConfig and the standard X libs). The addition is now part of the HEAD of GTK's CVS. Some might argue that Cairo should have been integrated to X instead (as an extension or as part of the core), so all toolkits would get the benefits, transparently (if enough engineering was to go into this). I sent an email to selected GTK+ developers last May about this, and here is what Owen Taylor, GTK's project leader, replied: Update: GTK+ 2.6.2 released.
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GnomeFiles Reaches 100,000 Downloads, 500+ App Entries

GTK+ 42 Comments
We are very happy to announce that our little side project, GnomeFiles.org has reached as of this moment 535 application entries, 100,000 downloads and an average of ~19,000 pageviews per day, all in about 5 months since its first publication. We would like to thank our readers and the GTK+/GTK-binding developers who supported the project so far. Update: Search Plugin for Firefox/Mozilla now available (get it from the bottom of the GnomeFiles page).
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GTK+ Challenge: Make Pango Faster; Desktop Integration Bounty

  Submitted by JB GTK+ 66 Comments
Red Hat's Christopher Blizzard found that Pango is significantly slower than XFT (which itself is not a speed demon either) resulting on slower desktop Gnome/GTK+ software perfomance. The Pango maintainer, Owen Taylor, says that he's been opposed in the past to creating a fast path for latin text because it means that the non-english code paths won't get nearly as much testing. However, Owen now said that if we can find him a clean patch that would do it, he might take it and that "would make the entire desktop faster". Elsewhere, the Gnome Foundation has put up a Desktop Integration Bounty.
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