Re: Writing Gnome Applets Tutorial

[Andrew Burton <adb iinet net au>]

On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 12:49, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> 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.

Thanks Malcolm,

I've made the changes and uploaded the new document to the same place
(http://members.iinet.net.au/~adburton/articles/appletstutorial.sgml).

Regards,

Andrew