Re: Splash screen as widget

[jcupitt gmail com]

2008/6/11 George Brink <siberianowl yahoo com>:
> By the way, why splash screen is not in the default set of library widgets?
> I believe it is very common thing for almost all modern applications...

There's one in GNOME, but it's not been pushed down into GTK. There
was a discussion about it, I seem to remember, but I forget why it was
resisted.

The HIG says that your app should start up quickly enough that it
doesn't need a splash screen, which is good advice, if not always
possible. GIMP still has a splash widget, heh.

> That rises another question: Tutorial I read, suggests to use
> g_type_register_static() with GTypeInfo structure instead of
> gtk_type_unique() with GtkTypeInfo. Author of tutorial does not explain why
> he prefer g_type_register_static() over gtk_type_unique(). I guess, first

The type system used to be in GTK, but for gtk2.0 it was moved down a
layer into glib (as the gobject library).

So the modern, recommended way is g_type_register_static() and
gtk_type_unique() is now just a compatibility stub. You still see it
sometimes in code that's been ported from gtk-1.2.

>>>       while(gtk_events_pending()) {
>>>               gtk_main_iteration();
>>>       }
>>
>> That's from a rather old tutorial, better to use:
>>
>>       while( g_main_context_iteration( NULL, FALSE ) )
>>               ;
>
> Why is that better? One is for gtk events only, other also works with glib
> events?

Same reason: the main loop used to be part of gtk, but in the 2.0
series it's been pushed down into glib and the gtk functions are just
compatibility stubs.

John