Re: GTK not good for newbies?

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw iprimus com au>]

Matthew A Tobiasz wrote:
> Hello gtk-app-devel-list !
>
> I just started using GTK for the first time about four days ago. I'm working 
> on doing scientific visualization using OpenGL (another thing I just started 
> learning) and I come from a C/Java background (notice C comes first).  I've 
> never used C++ and since GLUT just doesn't have what I need in the way of 
> user interfaces, I started looking for a GUI library to get the job done.  
> I've was recommended Qt, but that's just too C++ for me right now (and since 
> no one cares how I get the job done [ah, University], I wanna stick with the 
> Dennis Ritchie camp and leave Bjarne Stroustrup and crew for another day). So 
> Gtk was what I wanted to go with (using OpenGL via GtkGLExt).

Once you understand gtk, a very quick and easy way to make a GUI in an
inherently OO language is to use pygtk. Python is interpreted, so there's
no compilation needed. Manual GUI creation in C isn't hard once you know
it anyway.

> So four days in, what can I say about using GTK?  Well there are docs out 
> there:
>         GTK+ / Gnome Application Development
>         http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/ggad.html
> And tutorials:
>         GTK+ 2.0 Tutorial
>         http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/index.html
> The one problem for "newbies" who are new to GTK and glib (like myself), is 
> figuring out how to do things the glib way. Right now I said, screw that I'm 
> going with:
>         fprintf(stderr, "ERROR...");
>         exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
> Rather then rewriting my old code to use 
> 	g_critical();
> I wasted a bunch of time trying to covert old stuff to the glib way, so the 
> libc way of doing things is staying in this project. 
>
> Once I got through the initial learning curve, things aren't so bad.  There is 
> a point that needs to be made about the available API.  I've used the Java 
> API (so that's what I'm juxtaposing against), now the thing that sucks about 
> the GTK API is having to go through a bunch of web nodes to find what it is 
> your looking for. A centralized function list would be great.  Right now I
> use the GTK Object Hierarchy:   
>         http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/ch01.html
> as my "centralized" location for searching.  I might just be ignorant here and 
> such a thing does exist, but as of Tue Feb 17 00:20:59 MST 2004 I haven't 
> found it.

Install Devhelp and the gtk books. In the "Search" tab, type "signal". All
the gtk signals will be listed.

> One documentation section that I think is lacking is docs on signals. The 
> general usage and implementation docs are there, but I haven't found a 
> complete list of the available signals that can be connected to each widget.  
> This would be nice.