Re: Future of Canvas on GTK+ (and probably GNOME)

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 17:53 -0500, muppet wrote:
> On Feb 11, 2005, at 3:21 PM, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > An important question is what a canvas widget is for. In the GNOME 1.x
> > days, GnomeCanvas was used to implement a lot of custom widgets.
> > However, in GNOME 2.x that is very uncommon; because of accessibility
> > concerns and because GTK+ itself provides anti-flicker capabilities.
> >
> > So it would be interesting to map where the canvas is still used. I'd
> > assume gnome-games and nautilus for example.
> 
> I use GnomeCanvas for interactive structured graphics --- a view where 
> the user directly manipulates shapes and objects that represent things 
> in a document that aren't text cells.  Think of flowcharts or graphs or 
> things of that nature.  Having canvas items which are basically drawing 
> elements with events is really handy, relieving the application 
> programmer of responsibility for tedious things like hit testing.

People also use the canvas when they need a z dimension, allowing
overlapping objects.

> Also keep in mind that many apps of this nature are small-audience, 
> special use, in-house things.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com