Re: What is the minimum number of lines to update a gui window without user clicking a button

["L. D. James" <ljames apollo3 com>]

Thanks for the advise, Chris

I already have a lot of applications of which I hope to put into place for my clients who see a monster when they see a text screen.

Many of the task are very simple task, such as connecting to a VPN and giving a status of each step, so that if any component failed, or got stuck, the client could see it and not be turned off by seeing the text screen.

I try to get people not to be so turned off by the text screen, but in this world, they are.

Also, I'm making some of the task as launchers from the Ubuntu Unity button.  The console screen doesn't look appealing, even to me.  To many people (not to me of course, because I almost always work with a console terminal and do most of my work remotely) when they see a console screen that think that is evidence that something has crashed, or something bad is happening.

I'm taking your advise, and had begun doing a lot of studying before I starting asking my questions and asking for help.  I know that I could eventually figure all this out without help.  But it'd take me years, whereas I was hoping that there might be some users of this mailing list, such as Alan and Andrew that might not mind parting with some of their experience and helping me over some of my hurtles.

I don't mean to aggravate the group with my questions.  I assure you, I won't be novice in this matter for long.  I'm a very fast learner and at present have some gaps.

In my research some new users have been given the opposite advice of what you had suggested to me.  Some users have been told to study gtkmm and become familiar with this interface which had done a lot of work with the lower level of gtk and gtk++.  They might waste a lot of time trying to reinvent the wheel  ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3448937/class-extending-gtkwindow ) for something already provided if they try to do it with gtk instead of learning gtkmm.

Of course, you may be right, in that gtkmm has not taken into account that a person might want to simply update the gui.

I believe there is a need in this capacity.  Kjell mention in his message that, the need is there, and the solution is provided, but didn't have any examples.  He has started to fill the void.

I already mentioned that I debated whether to learn gtkmm or to go a different direction.  I even considered as you just suggested in working with gtk instead of gtkmm, but took the advise of another expert to learn how to use the gtkmm interface, rather than doing everything from a low level and reinventing the wheel.

I can tell from Kjell's message that what I'm trying to do is already implemented in gtkmm.  At present using it, just isn't all that clear.  I hope to contribute to the group by assisting in helping things to be clearer, and to help close gaps that might exist.

I can already easily update the console with a status without user input.  I believe there is also merit in updating agui window without user input, of which, I appreciate the few people who have taking the time to understand the problem and investigated it.

As far as realworld applications, most applications have some element of processing and outputting a status to the user without the user having to sit at the concole and constantly click buttons.  I really appreciate your input and suggestions.  But I believe you're misunderstanding the question.  I realize buttons and user input is an important part of applications.  However, at present, I would just like to be able to output notifications to my clients into a gui window without my application having to be hung until they come to the computer and click a button.  The purpose of what I'm trying to do is allow the user to know at which stage the application has progressed, and to be able to report to me any messages, errors status updates that I present.  As far as the VPN connection, if my program is waiting for an internet connection, it will state that.  When it has the connection, without the user having to come back and tell the program to continue, it will just update, internet connection established, the remote host is currently off line... will try again in 5 minutes.  The  present console program eventually says, vpn connection established now configuring the local routing.

I have many applications (or c++ routines) to do things such as that.  They all output to a black screen.  They frighten my customers.  I hope to find a simple way of outputting the status to a friendly gui window.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful with my reply, but I'm hoping that I'm clarifying what I'm trying to do, and that it does have some merit.

-- L. James

-- 
L. D. James
ljames apollo3 com
www.apollo3.com/~ljames

On Sat, 2013-08-10 at 13:54 +0100, Chris Vine wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Aug 2013 05:43:42 -0400
> "L. D. James" <ljames apollo3 com> wrote:
> > When I first started programming and was able to output a "Hello
> > World", I was happy.  It worked.  I made lots of changes and
> > understood it. When I performed my first I/O  it was just a minimum
> > number of lines and did a strictly limited task.  I was able to
> > dissect it in one short session, then start using it productively in
> > my crude programs.
> > 
> > I'm trying to find this same strict focus with outputting and updating
> > the gtkmm gui (without user input).  If I can understand this, I'll
> > have a foundation of which I could build upon.
>
> The point you may not understand is that you would rarely if ever want
> to do this in a simple real-world application, and particularly where
> your simple application is a learning exercise about using GTK+. GTK+
> is, like almost all other GUI toolkits, event driven, and runs in a main
> loop. Therefore, if text arrives which you want to put in a widget, it
> would normally arrive as an event.  If you are monitoring I/O, you
> would use Glib::signal_io().connect() to connect a file descriptor or
> Glib::IOChannel object to the main loop. Similar convenience functions
> are available for timeouts and idle handlers.
>
> I would strongly advise you not to get involved in using threads until
> you have more programming experience.
>
> Chris