Tag Archives: developer

GNOME Docs in Cambridge: day two

Application and desktop help

I worked on merging new games documentation which was written by Rashi Aswani and fixing some of our 100-odd bugs against application help which Petr Kovar has continued triaging.

Jim Campbell started refactoring Files (nautilus) desktop help as the style of the pages was a bit outdated. It now looks awesome.

In the mean time, Jana Švárová continued powering through the feedback.

Licensing

gedit documentation saw some licensing improvements thanks to Jim. A number of the help pages had previously been published without a license which is something that the team has been fixing over the last few years. Adding the license after the pages have been written is a bit of an arduous task. Progress has been slow but steady.

Developer Documentation

Bastian Ilsø and David King made further progress on gnome-devel-docs. Bastian made improvements to the first user experience of writing an application using the platform demos and learnt the importance of validating the XML.

yelp

Around August 2014, the documentation team started accepting emailed feedback about the documentation from help.gnome.org. It has been quite a success and yelp will see this feature as soon as Shaun McCance can build it.

Mallard

Shaun also improved projectmallard.org, the home of Mallard, and furthered the development of DuckType, a markdown Mallard language.

The end

We finished the day with lovely cream tea, which caused a number of altercations due to cultural and regional conflicts.

Developer documentation

Developing GTK 3 apps with Python on Windows

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This blogpost is by Geoffrey French, who has joined us for the Docs Hackfest which is happening this week at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Kat invited me to write this guest post on her blog, describing my experiences of the Norwich GNOME Docs Hackfest held at the University of East Anglia School of Computing Sciences over the last few days. I joined the hackfest as I recently started using Gnome 3 after installing Fedora 20. My personal website is at www.britefury.com. I am the author of two interactive programming environments for Python; The Larch Environment and The Ubiquitous Larch.

My initial focus was on helping developers get started with developing Gtk+ v3.x apps in Python for the Windows platform. I feel that Windows is an important platform due to the large user base; being able to develop software for them can only be a good thing.

My prior experience with developing Gtk+ apps in Python was gained while developing gSculpt, a 3D modelling program. At the time (2008) I targeted Gtk+ v2.x using the PyGtk Python bindings. Since Gtk+ v3.x however, PyGtk has been replaced with GObject introspection based bindings for external langauges.

Luckily getting started Gtk 3.x development on Python for Windows is very easy; thanks to the hard work of Simon Feltman et al there is a nice installer package that does all the work for you! You can also use either Python 2 or Python3 as a bonus.

The first (if obvious) step is to ensure that you have Python installed; either versions 2.7 or 3.3 are fine. Next, you need to install PyGObject. You can download the Win32 installer here. You get a large 130MB installer which comes bundled with PyGObject Gtk, glib and many other Gnome libraries; so no need to hunt down dependencies. When you run the installer, you will be asked to choose a Python interpreter to install for (2.x or 3.x if you have multiple interpreters installed). Next, you can choose the packages that you want; ensure that you select Gtk at least.

After that, you are good to go!

If you want to learn Gtk using Python, the Python GTK+ 3 tutorial would be a good place to start.

Writing about it

After finding out that getting going was so easy – and noticing that this fact was not immediately obvious – I decided that it would be good start to write about it, so that people can find this out.

Since I was going to be working on Windows, it seemed to make sense to try to write Mallard documents on Windows too. Unfortunately, getting Yelp installed was not nearly so easy. I regret to say, that after installing MinGW, some circular dependencies involving pkg-config and glib caused me to give up.

The Hackfest

I found out about the hackfest shortly before it was due to start. I decided to join and was greeted by welcoming and friendly faces who helped me get started quickly. I am happy to have met everyone and I hope to collaborate with them again in the future!

Kat's log