Tag Archives: gnome

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!

Updating documentation for 3.10

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5642995221_84a6f913b7_bWith only a few hours to go until the 3.10.2 tarballs are due, here’s a recap of what the documentation team has been up to:

  • gnome-user-docs started being updated for 3.10 mid-September: it is moderately difficult to test the UI and functionality before the 3.x.92 release
  • the updates were done by 10 documentation team members and translators
  • after the docs-i18n brainstorming at GUADEC, the docs team made sure to keep translators up-to-date on what was happening
  • the changes in the UI affect almost every one of the 293 live pages
  • updating 293 pages takes a lot of time and the updates were not finished in time for 3.10.2 so there will be a 3.10.3 release sometime before next year
  • the translators appreciate the docs team how-to for taking screenshots almost as much as knowing  what’s going on
  • screenshots are still a pain to update
  • the docs team sucks at giving translators enough time for translations

As the docs team has been concentrating on the desktop help, some of the application help has been neglected a bit, which is somewhat unfortunate. There are also a few things that could make updating both application and desktop help easier for the team, such as fewer UI changes between each major release, notification emails about freeze breaks (not all developers send these), fewer UI and functionality changes after the freeze.

GUADEC videos

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Interns lightning talks by Ana Rey, CC-by-SA 2.0The GUADEC videos had been put up a little while back on SuperLectures, where they will be available at least until next year. As a more permanent solution, the videos are also available on http://videos.guadec.org/2013/ (incidentally, this also means that we’ve run out of space on our backup machine).

If anyone is interested in creating a pretty website, which is gnome.org-like, for downloading the videos, they should come forward as I hope we will have more videos to add next year.

Also, I found out this year that there were no videos from the Desktop Summit 2011 (Berlin) because, after the network failure, the USB hard disk impromptu backup solution did not work as the camaras produced data too fast and the recordings were jittery.

Post-GUADEC fun

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Lightmatter paperworkGUADEC may be over, but there’s still plenty of follow-up work going on, like processing the reimbursements for sponsored attendees.

The Travel Committee has received only around 30% of receipts so far, but that has been enough to almsot give some of us a mental breakdown as it takes around 20-30 minutes to process each set of receipts if there are no problems.

For the sake of our sanity (and If you want your reimbursement to be processed quickly and painlessly) please make sure to send all of your email receipts as PDFs and all scans as JPEGs or PNGs. Forwarded emails, .docx and .doc files are problems which kill bunnies. Please don’t kill bunnies.

Going to GUADEC (again)

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Waiting for the bus

Unlike for most of you, GUADEC will be starting a day early for me as this is one of the only opportunities for the board to have an in-person meeting, which means that I will be in Brno from tomorrow evening. This board meeting is normally the time when the handover from the old board to the new board is completed and the new board takes responsibility for the various roles.

A few things to keep in mind when travelling in the Czech Republic:

  • Withdraw cash in odd amounts so that you do not end up with a 1000 CZK or 2000 CZK note because it’s a pain to spend the larger notes. I recommend withdrawing 800 CZK or 1800 CZK at a time.
  • Buy transport tickets, the fines for not having a ticket are high.
  • Four useful phrases:
    • Thank you: deek
    • Please: proseem
    • I want to pay the bill [at a restaurant]: zaplatit proseem
    • [Pay] together/separately: do hromady/kazdi vlazdi’

Open Help, part 2

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For those of you who have not been before, Open Help has quite a standard conference layout of two conference days over the weekend followed by three hacking days during the week. As I mentioned before, I joined the travel committee a few months ago and was working on processing GUADEC sponsorsip requests. A number of the summer interns asked me to explain to them what is the difference between conference days and BoFs. So, this is what our conference days at Open Help were like:

Lilly Danger and the hat

And this was what our hacking days were like:

Too much chili

We took one look at https://developer.gnome.org/ and decided that it needed some care. After quite a lot of brainstorming and debate, we concluded that the structure of the Developer Center needs to be simplified, which is now a work-in-progress in master.

One of the biggest issues that we addressed is that the Documentation Team does not have the manpower to keep up with all the cool new stuff that developers should know about. Ryan is leading the effort to try a different approach which we hope may be more developer friendly when it comes to maintenance and new content with a “How Do I…?” series on the wiki.

In the mean time, we are aiming to merge the platform-demos, the examples and mini-showcase applications, into what is currently the platform overview.

For more details on the state of https://developer.gnome.org/, have a look at the Documentation Team’s planning pages on the wiki.

I was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation!Open Help Conference & Sprints

Open Help, part 1

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Open Help is on this weekend in Cincinnati. We’re half way through the two conference days and have seen very interesting presentations from Jorge Castro about helping users help users, Janet Swisher on sprints and Rich Bowen about writing better help, which led to interesting discussions during the panel and open floor.

Happy Jimmimico

The trip over to the US was a bit long as Dave and I were delayed at almost every point of the way, but we finally arrived in Cincinnati after a 22 hour trip to a lovely reception at Via Vite on Fountain Square.

The conference itself has a very relaxed atmosphere. With around 40 attendees, it is possible to meet everyone and it is rather nice to have a fluid schedule. There are people here from a range of different projects, including Drupal, the Wikimedia Foundation and WordPress, including four people who previously participated in the OPW. Unfortunately, Sindhu and Aruna, the Documentation Team interns from round 5 and 6, could not make it because they have exams right now, but I am hoping to meet them at GUADEC.

Open Help Conference & Sprints

Sponsorships for GUADEC 2013

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The big kidWe had a grand total of 54 sponsorship applications for GUADEC and a budget of €30,000 (approximately $39,000). The requests amounted to $57,668 which we calculated would be more realistic at $53,661 after verifying travel costs. We were able to offer sponsorships to the amount of $45,055 to all 54 applicants, as Google will kindly assist with some of the cost of bringing the interns to GUADEC.

The applicants consisted of 24 Foundation members, 12 speakers, 24 GSoC students, 5 OPW interns, 18 women and 1 journalist.

The first application was received on the 5th of April (thank you for being organised) and three applications were late.

This was the first event that I have helped process from the start, with lots of help from Germán. The earlier applications were generally easy to process, but some of the later applications were more time consuming as not all were complete and precise, so we needed to verify details. Sorting applications is surprisingly time consuming, three of the travel committee members spent around 51 hours on it over the last week, and there are many points to consider before making the offers. Overall, the applicants have been happy with the offers that they have received, some have already booked their travel, and it is satisfying to see so many Foundation members and new contributors being given the opportunity to come to GUADEC.

Gearing up for GUADEC

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Old town hall in BrnoGUADEC is only a couple of months away, so it’s time to start planning for it. The main conference days will be on the 1st to 4th of August, while the BoFs will run from the 5th to the 8th of August.

For those of you who have not been to GUADEC before, the talks happen during the main days while BoFs are reserved for planning and hacking sessions.

The travel sponsorship application period will close in a few days, so now is the time to send in your applications and volunteer to help out during the conference!