"Hello world"

[Ross Clement <rclement dmu ac uk>]

Hi. I'm now writing my first ever gtk program. I'm using glade to build
the interface and am writing the rest of the C code in vi :-) Previously
I wrote all my cross-platform GUI programs in Java, but for some audio
things I would like to do I would prefer to use C. So writing a gtk
application seems a reasonable experiment. The program I'm writing is an
audio application using PortAudio for audio i/o.

So far I haven't had any show-stopping problems. Though, I haven't tried
making my dialogs modal. ... OK, as I write this I look up
gtk_widget_set_sensitive() and it does what it says on the tin. I have
written some small programs using Simple Direct Media Layer, and would
like to be able to create borderless and fullscreen windows in GtK.
Having a quick look around, it looks like I can do this if I use a popup
window so that it does not have a title bar? I found a "wheelbarrow"
example for shaped windows, which indicates that borderless windows
should be easy. 

The big thing I have to do now is animation. I've noted that I can't get
expose events going quickly enough unless I do the gtk_main_loop myself,
having the following code:

    while ( gtk_events_pending ())
            gtk_main_iteration ();

in my program after processing a block of audio. Not sure how things
will look when I try animating, especially since I've written
double-buffering code and I've learned that this was not necessary.

Oh well, the gtk adventure continues and this email gives an overview of
where I'm up to.

Cheers,

Ross-c