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

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2009/2/19 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?

Is just an idea, so that people understand easily that you have more
components outside of gtk+.
Glade for example is not part of Gtk+, but it is an essential tool, we
want to give that notion.

> 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?

That's the idea, yeah, seems I'm not that crazy then ;-)

-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz