The last days I had the plessure to attend the GTK+ Hackfest in Brno, Czech Republic. The first two days did overlap with the Fedora Developer Conference 2012 where I gave a talk laying out the interaction between the Sugar and the leaning platform (Sugar: using the GNOME platform to build a learning platform). The slides can be found here.
One of the main topics of the hackfest was touch support in GTK+. Which was very exciting to me. Matthias Clasen gave a good summary of the plans and what API we can expect to have in 3.4 in his post. Having scrolling and basic touch events working in 3.4 will be a great basis to start our touch support work in Sugar.
A longtime plan has been made how to integrate Clutter with GTK+ (see Emmanuele Bassi’s post on that). This is all a very exciting domain, another reason why I am excited about the software redering fixup work from Adam Jackson, Fedora 17 Alpha is on it’s way, let’s see what the status of that work is there…
Good news for all the “Sugar-palette-hackers”: there had been fruitful discussions on the future of GTK-Menu: There is the desire to have a menu invoked by a button/widget click, the possibility to put different widgets in the menu, to keep the old feature of keyboard navigation and to fix the grabbing the menu is curently doing. Doesn’t that sound like the same job description as Sugar Palettes have? If we then as well handle the hovering on mouse over and the popdown correctly we are done. For sub menus we should investigate the folded secondary options like the GNOME shell has. This looks like it would solve the “menu-goes-away-while-navigating”-issue, one thing to get right are very long lists of course but this issue is present in any case.
Benjamin Otte has been putting a lot of efforts in validating the theme agains the css spec. For now we have to specify a unit for “border-radius”, “border-width” and “padding” others will follow.
Even though this hackfest has been more about discussions and planning (which is the right thing to do as those activities benefits a lot from being in the same room) I did a bit of hacking as well on custom GTK container support through gobject-introspection with Tomeu. I finalized Tomeu’s/John’s patches for this (663052 and 644926), hopefully we ca land this now soon.
I am really happy about all the progress that has been made during those days. Many thanks to all the organizers and espacially Florian Nadge and Petr Kovar for all their efforts in bringing us to the best food places in town. Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my accommodation, to my employer OLPC for sponsoring my time there and Red Hat for sponsoring the venue and the food.
Tags: gobject-introspection, GTK3