Re: Weird and wonderful visual styling of applications

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 01:23 +0000, Alex Jones wrote:
> Hi list
> 
> (Disclaimer: I'm completely clueless, so all of this may well be
> bullshit - put me right!)
> 
> I've noticed that more and more apps are departing from stock styling
> and implementing some more "adventurous" visual appearances,
> particularly when it comes to tree views. See the new tree view in
> Rhythmbox and Gossip (grey headings, twister on right hand side), and
> compare it to Evolution's (bold headings, style which is re-used for
> folders with unread items, and twisters on left).

Hi Alex,
   I think others have replied with good answers but I just
wanted to point out one thing that I think adds to this 
confusion; that would be the lack of a chosen canvas widget 
for gtk+.

Alot of the time when you have a dataset of ~200 or 
even ~200,000 items that resemble eachother, you want an 
optimized way to present this data in a list or tree-like
formation - thus the treeview, if you want a boring list
then you want anything that involves less code... but
if you want weird and wonderful - you really want a canvas
widget. I think its safe to say that its become a trend 
to resort to treeview hackery when weird and wonderful 
was actually called for - if only for the lack of a canvas
widget in gtk+ proper.

Just food for thought :)

Cheers,
                   -Tristan

PS:

Heres that link to Havoc's blog post about hippo canvas:
http://galaxy.osnews.com/v2/permalink.php/3517/text_layout_that_works_properly?.html

A couple quick links from that post that show lists
implemented as canvases:
http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Image:Stacker_Browse_Window.jpg
http://people.redhat.com/dfong/olpc/