Category Archives: Programming

GNOME, gtkmm

gtkmm Website Update

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For those that haven’t noticed, the gtkmm website has been updated recently. I tried to keep the markup more or less the same and do most of the changes with a stylesheet. I ended up needing to change the structure slightly, but for the most part, I could do most things with css, which was nice.

I’d really like it if the main website and the documentation (API and tutorial) all shared the same basic page structure and stylesheet, but there are a few complications. For instance, the main website source is located in the gnomemm-website cvs module, whereas the gtkmm API and turorial is located in the gtkmm module, and sharing files between cvs modules is difficult (impossible?). In addition, the main website source is static html, the API is generated by doxygen, and the tutorial is generated by docbook stylesheets. Getting all of these to generate the same general structure is probably possible, but again would require a shared html header and footer template between the two cvs modules.

So there are some issues that I’d really like to resolve, but I think it’s already a big improvement over the old site, so further improvements are on the backburner for now while I work on some actual code. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them to gtkmm-list.

I’ve also updated the information on the cairomm page significantly, which was previously very sparse. It could still use some more love, but at least it shouldn’t be much of a barrier to involvement in cairomm anymore.

cairomm

cairomm updates

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I’ve been working to get cairomm up to speed lately. I’ve wrapped pretty much all of the new API from the new cairo 1.2.0 release, so cairomm should be fairly full-featured now.

There are a couple of significant issues to deal with before an official 1.2.0 release of cairomm, the most important of which is that the Cairo::RefPtr implementation leaks memory by not deleting the C++ wrapper object (although the underlying C object does get destroyed). Murray’s got a good start on this in bug #7442, so it should be solved pretty quickly. There are a couple other minor things to sort out before I want to declare the API stable, but I’m feeling pretty good about it now.

So if you’re interested in having good C++ bindings for GNOME / GTK+, feel free to download the latest cairomm 1.1.10 release and give it a spin and let me know what you think.

GNOME

Geek vs. non-geek

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You know, I spend so much time in the free software world that I often forget how unusual it all is. For instance, I was submitting this bug against gtkmm the other day and joanne was reading over my shoulder:

I don’t think I’ve ever understood anything less than what you just wrote.

and (paraphrasing the header from this page):

In no alternate universe would I ever be ‘entering a bug into bugzilla’.

Of course, the word ‘bugzilla’ was uttered in a way that suggested that it was some sort of bizarre creature. Not that I really mind — people have different interests and she’s just one of the millions of people that have no interest in computers for their own sake.