Category: General

You havent seen me blog in a long time, but that doesnt mean I havent been busy doing gnome stuff 🙂

there was alot of demand this year for a Glade that eats up and spits out GtkBuilder format ui definitions, this was undoubtedly hard for me to dish out so I missed the last stable release, but now we’ve got the mechanics in place plus a hand full of new toys to share. So heres a sneak peek at whats available in Glade for todays GNOME development release…

First of all, GtkBuilder – in general if you open a GtkBuilder file you just edit it in its format, if you need to convert your glade file, you need to pass through the project preferences dialog (Edit->Preferences):

Setting the project format is undoable, and along with project target versions, will effect how the editors will react in glade (unavailable or warning highlighted widgets/properties by format and targetted version), I got a little carried away and brought you a fancy naming scheme control on the side. You’ll notice alot of the more commonly used editors have nicer formatting, we now have an iface that lets us format editor layouts by widget class (mostly we just add radio buttons with this), it also sports some ui candy; wrappy labels: long editor, short editor.

Another thing I had to do to get the show on the road was fix menus in gtk+ so that they would
build normally from GtkBuilder file input, I might be guilty of spreading roomers but there is a chance we’ll see that in a gtk+ stable release for GNOME 2.26… (currently native menus created by Glade will be depending on that release), oh yeah, we also have a simple editor in glade that applies pango attributes globally on your labels (without putting markup in translatable strings…)

Its worth noting what remarkable things you can do with GtkIconFactory, just create a factory, add icon sources to it, then use the newly created stock icons as stock ids in your widgets (its hard to make this feature obvious in Glade, it would really really rock if someone volunteered to write user documentation for Glade 3.6…), this feature allows you to define alternate graphics for your icon in different widget states, text directions etc (anyway, I was surprised by the obvious leverage after integrating that).

So I think the real question is “Do I really have to write yet another freakn treeview by hand ever ever again ?” … hehe, no I didnt mean to scare you, dont worry, you’ll never have to write one of those by hand again in your life 🙂 heres a shot of the whole app with some views and a model:

Editing treeviews/iconviews/comboboxes takes a few steps, you have to create a data store, create cell renderers and sometimes columns, you have to define column types and optionally data in the store and finally you have to assing renderer attributes either to hard coded values or to indexes in the data store – I did my best to unify all of this into a single 2 tab editor, its totally based on Juan Pablo’s original menu editor, so it supports dynamic type changing of cell renderers, and drag’n’drop of renderers in a treeview to reorder them or drop them into other columns, on the face page it has the editor for the toplevel view widget embedded on the left, and the associated treemodel editor on the right that allows you to add columns to your data store and add and edit data in the store. On the second page it allows for adding and removing cell renderers, and editing thier attiributes:

This one will let you choose columns by name/type from the model for use as cell renderer attributes, I’m still having problems laying these properties out coherently, I would also like the combo box to stay small while the menu resizes to display the whole value (I’m using ellipsize=end when the combo menu is not popped down, and displaying the full text only in the menu)… anyway, this part is highly functional but needs some work in the ui 😉

So that was a long time no see update on Glade and what we’ve been doing to it, in other news I have time on my hands so Im looking for some work (its pretty cold without a plane ticket in canada this time of year so I figured some planet roaming was in order) I put my text mode resume online today, in the mean time I got a great job helping the butcher at the supermarket shredding up meat all day, its spiritually calming honest grunt work and it sure beats relocating permanantly to california ;-D

I know I’ve been going on and on all week about how I’ve been staying up all night making glade a better tool, but really guys … whoa, you gotta see this.

With the freshly cooked after 2 years rewritten api docs of course !

Yay for no more confusion or fear of integrating widgets !

Its been a long week, I went ahead and rewrote the parser code in Glade from the ground up, and then moved on to support dual formats, Im a little ashamed to say that this huge hacking experience was brought to you by coffee and cigarettes, for lack of *cough* other illicit substances that may have done better for my health, all grievances aside, it really is a nice piece of work I’d like to share with you all (its 7:15am Sao Paulo time and I’m blogging while cooling down and getting ready to sleep).

So lets see, what do we have ?

Well the new parser supports what Ive been calling class level definitions of xml layouts, in other words your widget library plugin is allowed to define, read and write properties and children in customizable ways, this was ofcourse needed to support the different formats that some widget classes are loaded from using GtkBuilder. We’ve also added an option, available in Glade’s edit menu, to decide which format your project will be saved in, Libglade or GtkBuilder.

Currently all widgets and properties formerly supported by Glade can now be saved and loaded in both formats. We dont yet have any support for the fancy GObjects now supported by GtkBuilder but VERY thankfully Johan has already provided a first try patch to get UIManager, our most awkward exception to load, this also must have been alot of work (and we may still need a few minor tweaks in the core to get it running). Other exciting things such as liststores and sizegroups should follow suit without too much of a headache. Another caveat is that Glade still has no idea what widgets are deprecated in the new builder format, which should be easy enough to remedy (glade will currently just save any widgets in the new format regardless).

This work is now available in trunk, and I do sincerely hope you all enjoy 😉

… that I finally managed to add to glade trunk today

So I finally applied a refit version of Yevgen Muntyan’s patch

One common source of frustration about glade 3 has been that, sure you can add your own widgets to the runtime but, you gotta write that catalog, install a support module, or struggle with your setup so that we can load the type from the widget library, but you dont want to write a widget library just for that one widget you got in your app so, here’s the solution:

you make a catalog that looks like this one note the “parent” element from the “glade-widget-class” definition, it choses which widget class your “fake” widget class will derive from.

then, since we now have user defined search paths for catalogs and modules; you put it wherever you want (it has to keep the .xml extention though), lets say ~/mycatalogs

then you fire up glade like so:

GLADE_CATALOG_PATH=~/mycatalogs glade-3

And voila ! you got your widget in the glade runtime.

Happy Glading !

Whew, its been a rocky road trying to wrap things up in
time for gnome-2-18, but with one
string freeze break
and one remaining
crasher,
Glade
is pretty much ready for the show

Incase you wonder what we’ve been doing in 3.1 😉 well aside from
ironing out bugs in the framework as usual, we’ve been working on
the first version of the embedded workspace/one-window UI, which is
crash free except for the one I mentioned above, lets hope to see it
dissapear by 2.18.1… Juan has also been working on this bindings
framework – which is really a work in progress but proves that we
can easily load objects written in python and edit/serialize their
properties, C++ otoh proves to be a challenge…

Interestingly, I’m going to miss out on all the initial feedback
(complaints or otherwise ;-)) from the release… because I’ll be
chillaxing with the palm trees in florida for 5 days ! where
I’ll be attending one of the worlds biggest
breakdance competitions; so have fun untill then, I’ll be back
on the 19th ;-D