GTK+ 2.10 / Project Ridley Progress Blog (aka GtkGtk links)

During the last GTK+ meeting I got the idea that it might be nice to have a development blog about GTK+ 2.10 and Project Ridley. Some people shared my opinion that this might be a nice idea, but didn't feel the need to set up a separate blog for this. So, I decided to volunteer to write this up, and hope to post regular updates on the progress of GTK+ 2.10 and Project Ridley here. Of course that does not go without saying that GTK+ 2.10 is not, and will not be, the same as Project Ridley. One of the most interesting changes is probably the addition of GtkStatusIcon, a cross-platform API for “tray icons”. It has been based on EggStatusIcon, and in the progress of integrating in into GTK+ some small features have been added. There's a single API issue, namely notification. Those interested can find the header file of GtkStatusIcon here. Another thing which has been moved over from libegg to GTK+ is a cell renderer for displaying and editing accelerators/keybindings, now known as GtkCellRendererKeys. Also, support was added for extra virtual modifiers, so users can use the extra modified keys on their keyboards (like the Windows and Apple keys) when creating new keybindings. That work was discussed in here. Owen worked on a patch to rework the Unicode hex input code. With this new input code you can input a hex Unicode sequence in the following way: start by pressing Ctrl-Shift-U, and with Ctrl-Shift still held enter a sequence of hex digits. If you release one of the Ctrl or Shift keys or press on space, the character will be committed. More information on this patch is here. Alex Larsson has been working on rendering widgets to offscreen buffers, something we are going to use in the new canvas. You can read more about this in his recent blog entry. Don't miss out the demo! Federico returned to hacking GtkFileChooser and did some interesting optimizations. At last, we also got a bunch of new stock items: GTK_STOCK_CONNECT, GTK_STOCK_DISCONNECT and GTK_STOCK_SELECT_ALL. I hope to get another entry out within two weeks. Any comments on how to make entries like this more useful are always appreciated.