Skip to main content

New Year's Resolution

Well, everyone is supposed to have a new year's resolution and believe me I have a few. One of these is to bring the Gnocl project to a full 1.0.0 release this year! Needless to say, the project is growing as there are so many useful Gtk+/Gnome extensions to grab and divert one's attention when confronted with the need to resolve a nasty problem.
Putting that aside, the Yuletide break has provided me with almost a solid month of programming time to which has been devoted to a number of tasks:

1. Improving Gnocl support for Glade files.
2. Extending support to GtkBuilder xml files.
3. Modfying the code base to enable handle functions to be accessed from the builder module.
4. Implement gnocl support for all Gtk+ widgets.

The latter has been necessary because the early approach was to make Gtk+ programming as simple as possible. This meant, for instance, there was no scrollbar widget. The gnocl::text widget for instance, is in fact a megawidget placed inside a GtkScrolledWindow with matching GtkScrollBars. Boxes, too, needed extending. Ok, its a simple matter where Gnocl dermines wether or not to create a GtkHBox or GtkVBox. The properties being the same. Builder/Glade will create these unique objects and so gnocl needs to know how to handle these. At the moment, the implementation is about 80% complete. The most notable 'things to do' include sorting out the toolbar, the tree and listview. For the meantime the workaround would simply be to create the place holder and add these items from the Tcl side.
Other work undertaken over the Hols has been to reorganise the file structure of the project. Having all modules under one umbrella makefile was problematic to say the least. So, I bit the bullet and split away the various elements ie. canvas, sourceview etc into their own project directories. In one way this removes compilation and linkage depency problems although the makefiles needed reworking. The newer makefiles also enable the better managment of sub-project development as the handle compilation, installation of dependencies and upload to sourceforge.
A few bugs have been resolved too, especially the failure to close the gnocl::aboutDialog widget.
Today, I've just uploaded the latest update release of the gnocl::canvas widget.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

gnocl::calendar

Given this module some attention today. Added some of the more package wide options to the module and created customised handler for setting the month. (For some odd reason months are are counted 0-11 whereas days are 1-31.) There's still a little more to do to this one including the addition of code to store diary details. Here's the working test script to show the range of options at work. The percentage substitution string item %e explores something that I've been toying with, the name of the signal/event that initiated the call. Ok, a script can keep its own internal trace but who knows, it might prove useful. #--------------- # calendarTest.tcl #--------------- # Author:   William J Giddings # Date:     07/05/09 #--------------- #!/bin/sh # the next line restarts using tclsh \ exec tclsh "$0" "$@" #--------------- package require Gnocl set cal [gnocl::calendar] $cal configure -day 8 -month 7 -year 1956 $cal configure -rowHeight 1 -colWidth 1 $ca...

Gnocl Dashboard

Over the past few programming sessions I've been working on producing a central point, a dashboard, around which it's possible to see the various Gnocl widgets and commands in operation. In many ways like the demo script which shipped with the earlier releases of Gnocl but offers much more. The introspection functionality provides details of the various options and sub-commands of each Gnocl procedure which are displayed under the associated tab. Sample scripts are included for each item which offers newcomers a clearer insight into how make the most of what's on offer.

Getting Widget Style Properties

Until the move over to Gtk4, Gnocl is still built against the Gtk 2.21 libraries. One of the inconveniences of Gtk is getting and setting widget style settings which are considered to be set globally by the desktop style settings and not for the programmer to tinker around with. Needless to say, there are times when different defaults are preferred, largely to draw the users attention to 'something a bit different'. The function gtk_widget_modify_font  is a convenience function to set the widget basefont as shown in this snippet from the button.c module,  if ( options[baseFontIdx].status == GNOCL_STATUS_CHANGED ) { GtkWidget *label; label = gnoclFindChild ( GTK_WIDGET ( para->button ), GTK_TYPE_LABEL ); PangoFontDescription *font_desc = pango_font_description_from_string ( Tcl_GetString ( options[baseFontIdx].val.obj ) ); gtk_widget_modify_font ( GTK_WIDGET ( label ), font_desc ); pango_font_description_free ( font_desc ); } Unfortunately, there's no d...