alex diavatis | July 28, 2012

GTK Roadmap updates

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

It is Summer, everyone(!) is on GUADEC conference or watching to Olympics and everything goes slow in Gnome world for this week. Matthias Clasen pushed “Deprecate gdk threading support” patches in GTK Roadmap, but getting the chance we can see some more interesting things in here.

 

For GTK 3.6 there are some bug-fixes and they might add Event Controllers among others. What is more important is the “Full Wayland Support” that is not clearly a target for 3.6 and it might postponed for the version after.  Also the “A supported canvas widget” goal is still here marked as future for the last 5 years?

After what Otte posted and with my little (almost none) knowledge of GTK, I am wondering if they (Gnome) have to complete drop GTK and re-implement all the widgets on Clutter. Think this, Clutter is already ported on Wayland, it runs on Windows,  it has modern canvas support and 3D hardware acceleration, it can compose animations etc etc.. Lately Clutter gained an Action Object that you can easily get and set events and make some buttons and drag ‘n’ drop functionality.

Some Gnome apps run Clutter but this runs on GDK (I guess), and the mess with GTK continues. If you try to make for example a small application with not a lot of widgets, you’ll discover than code it with Clutter would be much easier than make it on GTK. Much easier and much more exciting. Writing GTK is boring while writing Clutter is ..hmm ..It just makes you happy!

Further more Clutter is an advanced toolkit (low level for the moment), that you can actually make some graphics and graph scenes, which later can be ported to many systems. If you use GTK and Clutter you obviously missing portability and you get into troubles with the constraints and limitations of GTK.

Can all widgets of GTK port on Clutter, and all Gnome Apps follow? In theory would be the optimal solution, but in practice more than 10 years of coding (GTK) would be just impossible to be re-written in another toolkit. Anyway I am just saying.. :)

On Gnome Live GTK Future Roadmap there is also a print dialog that is about 6month old:

but there is and something more fresh, which is marked also as future, it is an early design, but it seems not quite unlikely to arrive in 3.6.

A content selector for Files. It is similar to selector on Gnome Documents, and it looks like another touch screen friendly feature.

I’m really thinking to start some Clutter and GJS interface tutorials, just to show you how much simple is.  But it is Summer, time for laziness :) 

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  • Dennis

    Please do post some tutorials…lets help each other. I think the main problem is that people like me want to help the project but dont know how. Series of tutorials will absolutly help.

    • alex diavatis

      I’ll try to make some!

  • will

    If all the widgets are ported over to Clutter, it might be a good time to consider adding some new ones. I recently worked on a gtk program and I found the lack of a widget to specify spans of values quite frustrating. Consider specifying start and end times (to describe the duration of a shift, or a party or what have you) – either you have to use two spinboxes or two sliders (gross). What I’m imagining is a slider with two heads, similar to the Gimp widget for specifying gradients (albeit simpler).

    • alex diavatis

      “If all the widgets are ported over to Clutter”. That was just a thought of mine, it won’t happen. But I see all these pros of Clutter over GTK, that I cannot ignore this imaginary solution ;)

  • liam

    Feel free to correct me if i’m wrong but isn’t mt (moblin toolkit, which is supposed to b emerging with st at some point) exist within clutter? If so, then you already have a very strong basis for a gtk replacement since, between mt and st, you have a large number of widgets.
    Also, what’s wrong with using embedding a clutter stage within a gtk object? Thats been supported for awhile now, iirc.

    • alex diavatis

      I cannot correct you because I do not know. I don’t know much about GTK but I worked in Clutter full time for about 8 months. Making a fancy file browser with clutter (the UI) was about a day’s work. All events, all transitions and views were loading from json files. Clutter is like a toy.
      I think that Clutter runs on GDK not GTK. You cannot use GTK inside a Clutter actor, can you?

      • liam

        GDK is the lower level drawing library which talks draws objects using different backends (xlib,cairo,or clutter), but clutter also has apis to address X or OGL, so you can use clutter in a gnome environment in a few ways (this info was taken from the gnome developer site for clutter). So, gdk is responsible for drawing gtk, thus clutter should be able to draw gtk widgets explicitly. Additionally Clutter itself can take cairo textures, and since cairo draws gtk widgets… The canvas I was speaking of, however, was specifically a clutter stage inside a gtk widget. That would be the typical scenario for a canvas element I would think.
        Also, when I said mt, I meant Mx.