Re: [gtkmm] Suggestion: Alert dialogue boxes.

[Murray Cumming <murrayc usa net>]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 18:13, Roger Leigh wrote:
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> Hello again,
> 
> The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, Chapter 3 has a section about
> "Alerts" (dialogue boxes).  These are similar to a Gtk::MessageDialog,
> but have the alert text divided into two sections: "primary text" in
> large, bold text and "secondary text" in the normal font.  The primary
> text is the basic message, stating the situation in simple terms, with
> the secondary text providing further detail.

Yes:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/windows.html#alert-spacing

> I couldn't get the basic Gtk::MessageDialog to do this (you can't use
> Pango markup, or get at the label widget), so I've written a new
> AlertDialog class to do just this.

"HigAlertDialog" would make it really obvious.

>   It provides methods for setting
> both the primary and secondary text, and adds the appropriate Pango
> markup.  In all other respects, it's the same as the MessageDialog in
> terms of its interface.

I have never really investigated how GNOME apps are doing this now, but
it would be a good idea to investigate that. Also, this bug is probably
interesting:
 
> I've also created an ErrorDialog which derives from MessageDialog.
> This adds a "Show Details >>" button to the left-hand side of the
> action area, which displays a TextView containing diagnostic
> information when clicked (similar to the "Unhandled Exception"
> dialogue in MS Windows).  This could probably be improved slightly.
> 
> 
> I've attached the source for both classes, in the hope that they are
> useful.  Since they are very generic and useful in many situations, I
> thought perhaps they (or at least the ideas behind them) could be
> added to a future release of Gtkmm.  You are welcome to license them
> under the LGPL, and I'm willing to reassign copyright if needed.

These classes might be very useful and should therefore be reused, but
gtkmm should limit it's scope to wrapping GTK+. I'm sure people would
like to see gtkmm_higutils or something like that, or gtkmm extension
libraries in general.
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com