Re: Writing Gnome Applets Tutorial

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Hi Andrew,

On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 11:53 +1000, Andrew Burton wrote:
> I noticed that the Gnome website's tutorial on writing Gnome applets is
> looking quite old compared to the current way of doing them. So I have
> written up a tutorial for the new, Gnome2 way.
> 
> The source is available at
> http://members.iinet.net.au/~adburton/articles/appletstutorial.sgml. I'd
> love any feedback you might have; of course the article is available
> under the GFDL.

Excellent. We really need stuff like this. A couple of quick comments
follow from reading through it over lunch. I'll try to sit down and look
over the technical portion a bit more later.

(1) Where you call gnome-config to get the compilation flags, you should
be calling pkg-config.

        pkg-config --cflags libpanelapplet-2.0
        
will get the appropriate compiler settings, for example. In fact, you
can combine the compilation line into a single line (no need to build
and then link separately):

        gcc $(pkg-config --cflags --libs libpanelapplet-2.0) \
        -o my_applet my_applet.c

(2) It is probably worth updating the DOCTYPE to use DocBook-XML 4.2.
Version 3.1 is very old now.

(3) In the "Common Questions" section, you may wish to use the qandaset
element from DocBook and then put the question/answer pairs into a

        <qandaset><qandadiv>
        	<question>...</question>
        	<answer>...</answer>
        	...
        </qandadiv></qandaset>

block. This will ease the job for any alter translators and can also
make styling the final document a bit easier, for example.

(4) I would recommend making sure that your "hello world" example
compiles if it were cut-and-pasted from the document (which people will
possibly try to do). At the moment, this will not work, since you have a
couple of places with '!!' at the end of lines.

Cheers,
Malcolm