Club Silencio

GtkMenuToolButton

Yay! I’ve just committed the GtkMenuToolButton widget to GTK+ HEAD. Thanks to the help of federico and maclas I even managed to defeat the documentation build system vodoo and commit the basic docs for the widget… the widget should be straightforward to use anyway.
Having the widget in HEAD means that it will be in gtk 2.6 and thus it is available for Gnome 2.10 (or should I say 2.A?).
Now I only need to make some various projects use it.

LinuxWorldExpo.it

With a friend I went to the italian LinuxWorldExpo.
It wasn’t particularly good: the conference is focused toward business and the few techincal workshops required expensive fees. Not so disappointing, that’s pretty much what I expected. There was also a .org section with some stands of debian, fsf etc… obviously they were relegated in a sort of basement, below the main exposition room.
The nice thing is that I finally had the chance to meet paolo and we talked a bit about gedit, choosing a few priorities that we need to attack during the next devel cycle. If time permits.

Find Dialog

clarkbw discusses ideas for a better UI design of the find dialog to use in GNOME apps. In particular in gedit, the subject has been in discussion for some time.
While I agree that the current design has problems (the most annoying to me is that often the dialog covers the results), I am not convinced that the new proposed design is the way to go.
In particular it does not cover a particular aspect of searching in an editing app: how would “serach & replace” work?
I also have some doubts about the interaction described, in particular:

• “The focus is transferred to the results window”: in an editing app I would prefer if keyboard focus was left on the text, so that I can right away type in the point I was looking for
• “finally ESC closes the results window”: while I would be totally ok with this, it seems to me that the same rules used to say that ESC should *not* close the find dialog apply. If ESC is bound with the concept of undoing the changes and thus it should not be used for the close button of the find dialog, why is ok to use it to close the output window?

Foundation

I’m now a member of the GNOME Foundation. Yay!

GNOME 2.8

GNOME 2.8 is out! Congratulations to everyone involved.
In this devel cycle we didn’t manage to work a lot on gedit, just bugfixing and maintainance work… we’ll see if we get a bit more time for it in the next months, otherwise we may get replaced by the NEW PROGRAMMING TECHNOLOGY.

I also decided to apply for for membership in the GNOME foundation… I already wanted to do it last year, but then I forgot… we’ll see if I’ll get accepted.

DropdownToolButton

I submitted a bugreport to gtk requesting a simple widget which provides a ToolButton with a dropdown menu (like the Back and Forward button of a browser) since many apps in gnome have their own implementation of such a widget (gedit, epiphany, nautilus, evolution, etc)… my secret plan was to simply submit the bug and see someone implementing it like it happened for GtkAbout, but I ended up working a bit on it myself today, we’ll see how it goes.