Brad Taylor and I have been working on getting GTK to cross-compile for Win32 on his system also. We found a couple places where my process only worked for my system but we fixed them and I’ve updated my docs so that hopefully anyone can reproduce this.

I’ve posted my instructions online now, because a number of people contacted me after my last post about this and were interested in building GTK for Win32 also. So, I would like to hear from people and find out if this worked for others. If you have problems with it on your system and find a solution, I can add that to the docs.

I also want to move this over to live.gnome.org sometime. That seems like a more appropriate place for it. I’ll try to do that later this week.

Once again, a big thanks to Tor Lillqvist and everyone on #gtk+ who helped me with getting this stuff going.

So I sat down and invested some time into building GTK 2.10 on Windows today, with help from Tor. I think Tor usually builds it on Windows using MSYS or Cygwin or something, but I managed to cross-compile from Linux and it seemed to sort of work.

There isn’t really any good and up-to-date documentation online for how to build GTK on Win32, so I made a log of every step of my process so that this can (hopefully) be reproduced by others. We’re never going to get any of the Win32-related bugs fixed if nobody can build it. So my next step is to start over from scratch in a different target directory and turn my log into something more concise (there are a lot of trial and error steps in my log where something didn’t work and I had to go back and try something else). And there are a few steps where I had to hack configure scripts directly, and I’d like to be able to figure out real solutions to those steps.

I’ve been getting back into Gnome related technologies recently, for variousreasons. I started looking into Gnome’s accessibility project, like ATK and atk-spi. It’s pretty cool, I think. I had long ago started to work on a speech recognition interface for Gnome using CMU Sphinx and a Bonobo interface. It never got further than occasionally being able to recognize when I say “hello” and display a popup “Hello, world!” dialog. But it was cool.

Also, as I mentioned before, I was doing some GObjectification stuff for Øyvind Kolås on Horizon, and I think I mentioned my GPGPU framework that I started. I didn’t put too much time into that before because I was preparing for auditions mostly, but since the Dallas Symphony audition is over (and I didn’t win!) I have more hacking time. I am planning to take the Kansas City Symphony audition, but I don’t feel stressed about that in the way I did for the last three auditions. I think the Dallas audition really helped me chill out with audition preparation.

So I am inspired to get back to work on the GPU framework. I’m making a lot of changes in the design, although none of them are really all that major in how the framework will be used. Mostly this is abstraction stuff so that different backends could be plugged in (e.g., I’m working on a default OpenGL backend.. but you might make an OpenGL|ES backend, or even a DirectX backend if you were so inclined).

Since Øyvind is getting so far with the new canvas model for GEGL and is getting ready to work on integrating with BABL, I feel like I need to step up my work on this now and get at least some basic unit tests running. Hopefully I’ll have something ready to upload into the Subversion repo soon (Gnome is about to migrate from CVS to svn, and should be finished with that migration by the time this is ready to upload).

I’m hacking on my Gtk# app in Windows right now, because Visual Studio is amazing. I
couldn’t seem to get pixbufs to load from relative paths, because I couldn’t figure out what the present working directory is on anything in Windows, so I started fooling with the resource manager.

This is a very cool thing. You can put strings or images or whatever you want in there, then access it from your app as Properties.Resources.Foo. Very nice.

However, if you’re using images then they’re obviously stored as a System.Drawing.Bitmap, and Gtk# wants to deal with things as a Gdk.Pixbuf. So here’s a quick snippet of code to deal with that:

using System;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Drawing.Imaging;

public Gdk.Pixbuf CreateFromResource( Bitmap bitmap ) {

  BitmapData data = bitmap.LockBits( new Rectangle( 0, 0,

                                                    bitmap.Width, bitmap.Height,

                                                    PixelFormat.Format24bppRgb );

  IntPtr scan = data.Scan0;

  int size = bitmap.Width * bitmap.Height * 3;

  byte[] bdata = new byte[ size ];
  Gdk.Pixbuf pixbuf = null;
  unsafe

  {

    byte* p = (byte*)scan;

    for( int i = 0; i 

So I started testing out Monodevelop for hacking on my resurrected Ludwig van. It’s pretty nice, I think. Obviously it’s pretty far from Visual Studio, but it’s not bad. The big new thing in the latest release is the integration of stetic, the user interface builder.

Maybe I’m retarded, but I just can’t ever seem to save time by using these UI builders. Glade was okay, but so far I can’t figure out how to use stetic in any remotely useful way. In this respect, I don’t feel that Visual Studio is much further along because its UI builder is pretty useless too. But as I said, maybe I’m just retarded.

I started developing support for COLLADA in neoengine, in the form of a converter. Mattias convinced me that it’s probably pointless and
unwise to bother trying to make runtime support for it.

I’m taking the route of using Sony’s COLLADA DOM library for now, at least as a starting point. I dislike the design of it, but it’s the fastest way to get support.

One of the biggest motivations for this was knowing that NVIDIA’s upcoming tool, FX Composer 2, is going to support COLLADA documents. This will hopefully give us a very excellent material editor, at least for Windows platforms. Depending on how they design it, it would be awesome if we can get it to run on Linux. This may be possible via Mono because FX Composer 2 is being rewritten in C#. It very likely may still be impossible, depending on what external libraries they P/Invoke to. Then there is also the other obvious issue that we don’t have Managed DirectX on other
platforms.

I’m trying to help Øyvind Kolås out a little bit with Horizon, the little drawing app he’s writing for the Nokia 770. I’m beginning by converting the code over to be based upon GObject right now.

The canvas tiling architecture might lay a foundation for future work in gegl, which is the main reason I’m interested in this. I have some a big interest in doing some work on gegl, but it needs a lot of foundation work done on it before I can really begin working on the stuff I want to do. First it needs a new imaging framework, which will involve integrating babl into it for pixel format/image space conversion, and integrating whatever new image tiling stuff is made into it.

I’ve been hanging out at my mom’s house in Texas during winter break, and I took some time to do some hacking on Ludwig van. I ditched the C source code entirely and have been rewriting it using C#. The beginnings of the music notation layout engine are working horizontally, but it’s not doing any line-wrapping yet. There are still a lot of issues in the layout engine, but it’s coming along. I have a lot of work to do on the glyphs, and that’s going to consume an enormous amount of time. The glyph rendering itself is working flawlessly, and without a doubt the quality of the on-screen glyph rendering is much, much better than either Finale or Sibelius
already (thanks to Cairo, of course).

I’m probably going to stop programming on it again for awhile, because I have a lot of stuff that needs some intense practice. I have to finish learning the rest of Bartok concerto next semester, and that’s a bitch. But when I get Ludwig van further along, I’ll start making more posts about it and show off some nice screenshots.

A few days ago I finally received my 770 from Nokia. This thing is
absolutely fantastic! I haven’t had much time to play with it yet
because I have been playing with the orchestra in Sarasota this week,
and unfortunately have been driving back and forth almost every day.
The screen on this thing is fantastic, and I had no trouble getting
online using the 802.11bg adapter. Next stop: handheld Ludwig van!