GTK+ at GUADEC Summary

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Some of the people doing GTK+ work there (apologies for leaving people out):

  Jonathan Blandford
  Robert Brady
  Erwann Chenede
  Bill Haneman
  Alex Larsson
  Tim Janik
  Lee Mallabone
  DirectFB team (Denis Oliver Kropp, Andreas Hundt, Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer)
  Havoc Pennington
  Owen Taylor

There were a number of talks given at the conference about work being done
at the GTK+ level

 GTK+-2.0 talk

  Tim, Jonathan, Havoc, Alex, and myself gave a rapid-switching overview
  of GTK+-2.0. 

   http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/gtk/guadec2-i18n/

 Pango / I18N talk

  After the GTK+-2.0 talk, I ran over to another room, and spent 20 minutes
  trying to get my laptop to work with the projector before giving a talk
  about Pango and internationalization.

   http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/gtk/guadec2-pango/

 GNOME Accessibility Project

  Bill Haneman gave an overview of the work that his team is doing at
  Sun with adding accessibility support to GTK+ and GNOME.

  The talk included information about the what and why of accessibility
  support, a brief description of the architecture of their design,
  and a demo of a talking testgtk.

  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/presentations/GUADEC

 DirectFB talk

  Unfortunately, I missed this one. But they had a demo set up at their
  booth which was quite cool. 

  For those who don't know, DirectFB is a rendering layer that convergence.de
  is developing for set-top boxes and similar uses. It's has an orientation
  towards multi-media type use, with the ability to alpha-blend windows
  on top of video and so forth.

  They have a GDK backend for DirectFB with various coolness bullet points

   - Unfocused windows were half-alpha (not sure this is great useability 
     features, but it looks cool)
   - Alpha cursors
   - Anti-aliased text (thought that's a dime-a-dozen these days ;-)
   - Pixmap/buf engine with hardware accelerated stretch-blits.

  It would be nice, long term, to see some integration between this backend
  and the Linux-fb backend so code for things like software fallbacks
  for rendering can be shared. (The linux-fb has code from X in it and supports
  the full X rendering model, while the DirectFB code is comparatively
  limited and doesn't support arcs, stipples, 

  More information about directfb can be found at http://directfb.org


There was much discussion among the various developers at the conference;
reporting on all of it would be difficult, especially as I wasn't taking
notes, but a few things of note:

 Accessibility
  
  We sat down at lunch on Saturday and went through issues various
  issues with integrating ATK with GTK+. Most of the time was spent
  on various details. In particular, we discussed how fallbacks should work 
  when the accessibility-enabling library isn't loaded. 

  [ You don't want to write, if you can avoid it:

   accessible = gtk_widget_get_accessible (scrollbar);
   if (accessible && ATK_IS_ACCESSIBLE_VALUE (accessible))
     atk_accessible_value_set_value (ATK_ACCESSIBLE_VALUE (accessible), 5);

   But would rather write:
  
     atk_accessible_value_set_value (ATK_ACCESSIBLE_VALUE (gtk_widget_get_accessible (scrollbar), 5));

   Tim and Bill came up with a scheme where dynamically-typed dummy instances
   would be loaded when the accessibility-enabling library was not present ]

  However, we also went over the general architecture, and there was 
  general agreement that the scheme that the GAP team came up with 
  is a reasonable one.

 Multi-head display

  I spent quite a while talking with Erwann Chenede about his changes
  to add multi-screen and multi-head support to GDK.

  The design he has looks reasonable; there were quite a few details 
  that need to be done a little differently with full knowledge of
  what parts of the GDK are crufty, which parts are private and so
  forth, but the basics looked good.

  The important thing here is that it doesn't look like there will be
  any binary-incompatible changes, so we have quite a bit of flexibility
  in how we can incorporate this into GTK+. 

 Releases:

  Tim and I agreed that we would do weekly releases until we get 2.0.0
  out. First one (next day or so) is 1.3.4, which is badly needed to
  fix various problems with 1.3.3.