Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 11:07 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
>> I think it is important to do releases when you have progress in the 
>> project not just because you have some new shiny feature to give to 
>> people. 
> 
> Yes, releases are good, but we don't have to call them stable.

While the abstract "stay stable" vs "innovate" discussion is
interesting, I'm interested in hearing what kinds of features people
would add if, tomorrow, someone said "OK - out with the crack-pipes,
let's turn the funky feature dial up to 100".

What features/removal of bugs are desired for GTK+?

I've been hearing:
* more flexibility for the developer
* easier theming (CSS theming, nice effects, make it easy to ship & get
themes)
* easier creation of new widgets
* a great canvas widget
* enable rendering of widgets in a scene graph
* integration of Webkit
* enable easy animations (whatever this means)
* a rocking IDE that makes it as easy to create visually attractive apps
as it is on Mac

I'm not sure if any of these are sufficiently well defined to be easy to
accomplish - nor am I sure if doing all of these would make it really
nice for a developer.

I don't know if I'm an outlier, but what's always annoyed me about UI
programming in GTK+ is container widgets, and the need for me to worry
about them in the IDE. I don't understand why I can't drag & drop
widgets, and have the IDE take care of deciding what container widgets I
need, and integrate basic concepts like alignment & HIG compliance the
way the Mac form builder works.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org