Re: CrackPipe [was: Re: Legacy apps and themes]

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

Thought I'd point out that we have a working preferences system in
Anjuta which works on a somewhat similar concept, ehich is:

You design a Glade interface and name your fields to the property names.
A generic library then reads the property names, gets the widget type
and depending on the type, figures out how to get the value. The backend
is properties files, but of course, using GConf instead is trivial.

Basically, it's the reverse approach of CrackPipe: instead of specifying
the keys and generating the UI from it, you use Glade to specify your
dialog(s) and the preferences get created from it. The plus side is that
you get to use Glade to get nice control over the Preferences GUI. Also,
adding a new preference is as simple as adding a widget to the dialog.

> <quote who="Andrew Sobala">
> 
> > Looking at http://art.gnome.org/images/screenshots/COG-Shot.png, and the
> > real thing, it doesn't look so dissimilar to our own capplets. I don't
> > know what you are envisaging.
> 
> Oh, I forgot about the later versions of CoG... No idea where that's gone
> though.
> 
> > > -> it was meant to be a nice, reasonably pretty,
> > > TweakUI-style [1] preferences dialogue.
> >
> > Does anyone have any decent screenshots?
> 
> I will make some for you.
> 
> > You describe the user-interface in XML - not just what keys to use,
> > although it's based around linking keys to UI elements. Think glade, but
> > instead of arsing about trying to get tables HIG-compliant and then
> > binding gconf callbacks to all the widgets, you just generate a decent
> > dialog from it. And it's not as hard as it sounds. But it doesn't work
> > properly yet.
> 
> Jonathan has been talking about GConf-aware widgets a while back, which I
> believe are used in control-center -> he wanted to make these available in
> Glade/libglade, which would definitely assist any GConf-backed GUI hacking.
> Pretty sure his talk at GU4DEC will be about this, given the title. :-)
> 
> Not sure what the status is, but you might want to chat to him about it.
> 
> > btw, I _am_ developing crackpipe even if the current implementation has
> to
> > be thrown away. So if people would explain what the difference between
> > crackpipe and a super-advanced-crack-capplet is, it would be really
> > helpful.
> 
> I'll have to try out what you've done from CVS -> regardless, thanks
> *heaps*
> for getting this rolling, I'm sure there will be a lot of very thankful
> obsessive compulsive types. :-) And me, 'cos I reckon it would keep some of
> the trolls happy too. ;-)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> --
> GU4DEC: June 16th-18th in Dublin, Ireland
> http://www.guadec.org/
> 
>    "There are men with an appetite for fight and a sense of occasion, and
>                   then there is Waugh." - SMH, about Steve
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