Whats coming in GTK+ 2.12

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

I thought it might be a good idea to anticipate the release announcement for
GTK+ 2.12 by writing a series of mails about some of the new features that will
appear in the next stable release. I hope that this inspires some
people to play
with the new stuff, so that we can

- find api holes and problems before they get frozen in the stable release
- get some feedback on the quality (or lack thereof) of the api docs
- inspire people to write examples or gtk-demo additions that show new stuff


I'll start with GDK:

gdk_threads_add_idle
gdk_threads_add_idle_full
gdk_threads_add_timeout
gdk_threads_add_timeout_full
Better support for thread-safe handling of idles and timeouts. This set
of functions avoids race conditions in the handling of user data passed
to a callback that is run in a different thread. All uses of callbacks in
GTK+ have been converted to these functions.

gdk_display_supports_composite
gdk_window_set_composited
gdk_window_set_opacity
Support for translucent toplevel windows and for compositing of subwindows.
The latter needs changes to cairo and the X Composite extension that are
still pending (hi keithp!). The motivation for the subwindow compositing
is the new panel applet api, but there are certainly other interesting
things that can be done with it.

gdk_x11_display_broadcast_startup_message
gdk_x11_display_get_startup_notification_id
gdk_notify_startup_complete_with_id
These functions expose more of the startup notification mechanism;
applications should normally have no need for them, they are added in
preparation for new high-level apis that are not there yet: session-management,
unique-application, desktop-file-execute, etc.

gdk_window_beep
Like gdk_display_beep, but specific to a window. XKB allows very general
configuration of this, it is e.g. possible to have the window frame blink
instead of an audible bell. GTK+ has become a lot more beep-happy recently,
since failed keynav now causes beeps.

gdk_pango_attr_emboss_color_new
The GDK pango renderer can now emboss text using a different color instead
of the previously hardcoded white. This is controlled by pango attributes.