Re: Animation with GTK+

[geminitojanus <geminitojanus gmail com>]

On 9/12/07, Prokopenko, Konstantyn <kprokopenko ezem com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm totally new to the GUI application development in Linux X11. I was
> mostly involved in embedded non-graphical development.
> Now I need to create GUI interface application using GTK+.
> Could you advise me the best way to create animation of a rotating
> object in GTK window? This object is going to be a picture of a device
> rotating in sync with a real hardware device. Which library/extension I
> can use?

It really depends on the horsepower of your device. If it's got a
little brawn, you can probably do everything you want to do through
Cairo: http://cairographics.org (if your device is using a version of
GTK+ 2.8 or newer). Based on the change of the rotation in your
device, you could have it call the ::expose method on a
GtkDrawingArea, and simply do whatever drawing in Cairo you wish from
there. It's not incredibly powerful, but it's enough for simple
animations and such, and it saves you from having to port over a huge
canvas widget.

If you're using an older version of GTK+, or your hardware doesn't
have hardware floating point, performance might not be so hot through
Cairo though, and you'll want to look at messing with GdkPixbufs.

Hope that gets you started.

> Thank you.
>
> Regards,
> Konstantyn