Re: Glade (Re: What widgets in TES Construction Set?)

["Tristan Van Berkom" <tvb gnome org>]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Juhana Sadeharju <kouhia nic funet fi> wrote:
> About Glade. I tried to create something simple (which I don't
> remember now) it didn't succeed. The menubar was simple, but
> this equally simple thing was too hard. I will check it again
> and post to glade lists someday.
>
> It would be nice if there would be complete examples which
> could be grabbed and dragged to the project. This equals to
> adding complete subgraph of widgets to the project.

Yeah, weve discussed such a probable feature under the
terms of "widget templates", we would have offered a whole
bunch of composite widgets and dialogs based on the feature,
and also allow users to save a "template" so they could access
it in the palette... ofcourse nobody came around to do the work ;-)

Man the possibilities would be endless if we had more than 1.5
people working on Glade ! :D

> For other project, I need an audio waveform display with
> callbacks and with overdrawn controls (draggable selection edge)
> and displays (playhead time display moving with the pointer).
> It would be nice if I could grab an example of this kind of
> thing, and then modify it to my taste in Glade.
>
> Such an audio waveform display may require multiple pixmaps.
> If waveform is moved forward, only the new revealed waveform
> is drawn, and the rest are copied. One pixmap could contain the
> waveform and other the controls (which are widgets), the final
> rendering then composite of the two pixmaps.
> All the code making the framwork work could be part of the Glade
> (not the waveform drawing, not the audio reading).
>
> Then if I have an Open File dialog, I would want Glade to generate
> me a framework code for opening the audiofile at background
> thread, if necessary. If the waveform drawing LOD file is missing
> it needs to be generated and that may take time. At meanwhile user
> should be able to continue editing of other audio.
>
> Threads etc. are standard part of modern software so they should
> be easily available. If Glade searches for means to extends its
> cababilities, this would be the way.

Hi,
    Currently using glade you could conceivably edit anything you
want in glade - so long as you work with GObjects that have
properties and signals (you can even invent properties that
are loaded and saved in custom ways, like GtkListStore data
for example).

Now obviously I'm not going to write your toolkit of objects and
your application for you, but I can offer you a dynamic way to
edit save and load all your objects from an xml description,
whether your objects are waveforms contained inside a track
object which asks your waveforms to draw itself at specific
locations, depending on the waveform properties or data,
or whether your objects represent frames in an animation, or
even singleton objects that may represent devices on the
embedded system your writing your application for.

Nothing is stopping you from writing a GThreadedObject that runs
a thread when its in "active" state and the thread just fires a signal
for the code to implement.

As glade, we dont have the resources (and its not part of our
task description) to go and write all the fancy toolkits that we could
support, but I would love to see the envelope pushed, for instance,
I dont see any reason why GStreamer pipelines coulnt be edited in
glade and loaded by GtkBuilder.

Cheers,
                         -Tristan