GTK+ Archive

GTK+ 2.6.8 is released with many bugfixes, mainly in the filechooser.

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.

The GPE project updated their web site with brand new screenshots of their X-based PDA interface. Elsewhere, GTK+ 2.6.5 was released with bug fixes.

Novell's Ben Maurer has been reducing memory usage for Mono 1.1.x recently and he now asks for the same extend of optimizations to be done for GTK+ itself. Read more on his blog and the wiki.

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.

GTK+ 2.6, Pango 1.8, and Glib 2.6 have been released. Look for improvements coming to a Gnome or XFCE desktop near you soon.

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).

This bug-fixing version of GTK+ 2.4.11 fixes a number of bugs mostly in the file selector area. GLib 2.4.7 was also released.

Stable GTK+ 2.4.9 was released today, along with the unstable versions of GTK 2.5.2 and GLib 2.5.2.

GTK+ 2.4.6 and GLib 2.4.6 were released today. These are bug-fixing releases. Pango 1.4.1 was released a few days ago. Vote for it at GnomeFiles. Update: GTK+ 2.4.7 released.

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.

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen released GTK+ 2.5.1 and GLib 2.5.1 for testing.

Since the release of PHP5 a lot of interest has reverberated down through the whole PHP community. In particular, there's a call for a PHP-GTK 2.0 which will utilize GTK2 and will have an entire rewrite of it from the ground up to make use of new features.

The first unstable major version of GTK+ are out and about: Pango 1.5.1, GTK+ 2.5.0 and GLib 2.5.0. Among the new features are some visual ehancements on the way windows draw/resize.