Re: minutes of the gtk+ team meeting - 2009-01-20

[Luc Pionchon <pionchon luc gmail com>]

2009/2/18 Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>:

> The idea es that Gtk+ is actually something that enables really cool
> things, but we don't empower that idea from the website.
> The other point is that bindings seems like second class citizens
> whereas it's actually quite the opposite. I think that a lot of the
> confusion out there about Gtk+ being written in C is an issue, is that
> the documentation that you have in the webpage is all about C. Which
> is something that most people shouldn't bother about.
>
> The other point is that we need other sort of documentation, the
> tutorial is nothing but a widget-by-widget manual, not something that
> you want to use to learn how to build a useful Gtk+/GNOME app, the
> worst thing here is that this is the reference document used by some
> binding documentation (pygtk for example) so you spread a C-like api
> that doesn't really encourage subclassing and good practices for the
> sake of simplicity (useful from the C point of view).
>
> In this regard "Getting started with gtkmm" looks a much better
> approach to me, but since it is under the gtkmm.org umbrella, it
> doesn't get that much attention.
>
> Also, we need screencasts to create really basic apps with Gtkmm or
> PyGTK for example, so that people can really get into Gtk+ without
> even to follow a text document and start playing. This is how Rails
> got millions of developers really excited and faded Django out of the
> picture for some time, if you go to the RoR page, you can get a clue
> on how to start really easily and figure out what kind of things you
> can do.
>
> At the moment the Gtk+ webpage, although much better than the previous
> one, is all a lot of some boring text that doesn't really shows what
> Gtk+ can do and doesn't encourage anyone to try it unless you already
> know what it is.
>
> I plan to work on some other mockups of the website for other sections
> and I would like to get feedback from you guys.

The mockup looks great, and the reasoning makes full sense to me!

At the GNOME level, the "part of the GNOME dev platform" label, seems
very good. Is it a Gnome initiative? Would it be great if it would be
followed by the other components of the platform like GStreamer,
cairo, pango, etc., and if the related sites would follow similar
patterns so someone developing an application would have a familiar
feeling everywhere, as part of one single platform?


>
> --
> Cheers,
> Alberto Ruiz
>
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