Thomas Wood

I recently had cause to remind someone about the evilness of using backticks as quote marks, which lead me to dig up this really useful document: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

Please show this to anyone to who abuses backticks in this way and enlighten them!

We will be bringing up these ideas for discussion on gtk-devel-list.

This week I am in Dublin for the GTK+ theming hackfest. On Monday we spent a long time throwing ideas around and discussing various approaches. Thankfully since then, we got on with some proper hacking. I’ve been working on two things:

cairo based engine api

Ben and I have been working on completely converting the default GTK+ theme to cairo so that it will be easier to move to a completely cairo based api for theme engines in the future. This would allow third parties to draw widgets without the need for a GdkDrawable, or even X11 itself.

Css styling in GTK+

Rob and I also discussed CSS themeing and how we might implement this within GTK+. We decided it would be good to implement a way of styling generic GObject types as not all objects on screen and GtkWidgets (e.g. GtkCellRenderer). We decided to make a GStylesheet object which acts as a data store (implemented as a GObject wrapper around libcroco, which we’ve also been enhancing) and a GStylable interface (which would replace the style properties in GTK+). Apart from allowing us to style any GObject with CSS, this also allows third parties to retrieve style properties without creating their own fake GTK+ widget.

I’ve just created myself an account on github, and am pushing my work from this week there: http://github.com/thos

If anyone else (like me) is having problems with the iwlagn drivers (Intel wireless), try loading the driver with hardware encryption disabled. This seems to have solved the issue for me:

rmmod iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn swcrypto=1

Just updated art.gnome.org with the art-hub branch. This is a move in a slightly new direction for art.gnome.org, trying to focus on helping artists wanting to get involved in artwork for GNOME and free software. The user submitted themes and artwork are still there and at some point I hope to go through and pick out some of the best ones to create a new gallery of top quality artwork for GNOME. Many thanks to Andreas for the new front page design and all those in #gnome-art who helped out with testing and made suggestions.

As CSS styling is becoming more and more popular in application design, I’ve been experimenting at work with applying this to Clutter. We already have an experimental widget set built on top of Clutter called Tidy. Using Robert Staudinger’s css selection engine and libcroco, I was able to apply style information from a stylesheet to Tidy widgets.

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Images are also supported using the “background-image” property.

One big question for us was how many properties do we expose to CSS and how does it interact with the JSON functionality. For the moment, we are concentrating on using CSS to allow developers and designers to assign the same properties on many widgets. Internally, this is achieved using a “Stylable” interface and a Style object. The Style object is simply a data store that holds all the data associated with the CSS style sheet. The Sytable interface can be implemented by any GObject and used to install hooks for CSS properties. The Stylable object can query the Style and retrieve the values it needs.

An interesting aspect of this approach is that it doesn’t limit theming to just Widget derived classes. Any object can be made Stylable and obtain style data. This would be useful for other toolkits such as GTK+, where objects like CellRenderers currently cannot be styled in the theme because they do not derive from GtkWidget.

LinuxLiveExpo was last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This year it was held in combination with CreativePro and MacLive expos. Aidan arranged for GNOME to have a stand in the .org village and Michael and I helped out manning it. Unfortunately the GNOME event box went missing so it didn’t arrive for us to use (it has since turned up in France!). It seemed a lot quieter and a lot smaller than previous expos, but we still had fun on the Saturday evening when we went to a local pub with the KDE and OpenStreetmap contingent. It’ll be interesting to see if the Expo format survives much longer, but it still seems to be a good place to introduce people and small businesses to FOSS and GNOME.

It’s that time of year for the Linux Expo again (well actually it didn’t happen last year…). The dates are 23rd-25th October and this year it’s going under the guise of “LinuxLive Expo“. Interestingly, it is being co-located with CreativePro Expo and MacLive Expos, so there will certainly be lots of interesting things to see in addition to the normal .org village and other Linux vendors.

Aidan is organising the GNOME outing for this year and has set up a wiki page to co-ordinate manning the stall. If you can spare a few hours on any one of the days, please put your name down. We may even organise a pub meeting on one of the evenings.

We just updated our website with some exciting news…