Author: mr

Newly designed gtk.org now up and running!

Originally, the website for http://www.gtk.org was going to be updated in line with the release for GTK+ 3.0 but there were a few set backs and more review needed. Finally, it’s up and running thanks to a lot of help from Devin Samarin and comments from the GTK+ community.

We have more plans to improve things on the website such as business support around GTK+ which is not really obvious enough on the current website. As part of the updates to the new website, we now list more recently established maintainers of the toolkit (seen on the Development page).

GTK+ 3.0 Released

GTK+ 3.0 is a major new version of GTK+, containing far too many changes to list them all here.

The major highlights include:

  • Cairo drawing throughout. GDK no longer wraps the antiquated X11 drawing API; we’ve made a clean break and exclusively rely on cairo for all our drawing needs now. This has also enabled us to remove several other X11-centric concepts such as GCs, colormaps and pixmaps.
  • Modern input device handling. The input device handling in GDK has long been a sadly neglected area. This has changed; with 3.0, GTK+ steps into the modern world of XI2 with full support for multiple pointers, keyboards and other gizmos.
  • A new theming API which sports a familiar CSS syntax for theme configuration and other improvements such as animated state transitions.
  • More flexible geometry management, with support for height-for-width, for both widgets and cell renderers.
  • Multiple backend support for GDK. With GTK+ 2.x, you had to recompile your application to have it work with a different GDK backend. In GTK+ 3, multiple GDK backends can be built into a single library and selected at runtime.
  • Easy application support. With the integration of D-Bus support in GIO, we could finally add a GtkApplication class that handles a lot of the platform integration aspects of writing an application, such as keeping track of open Windows, ensuring uniqueness, exporting actions, etc.
  • Of course, there’s some new widgets as well, such as a switch and an application chooser.

GTK+ is the work of hundreds of contributors, far too many to list them all here. But I want to take the time to thank some people who contributed in a major way:

  • Carlos Garnacho (Lanedo), for his work on XI2 support and the new theme system
  • Benjamin Otte (Red Hat), for his work on GDK and cairo drawing
  • Tristan Van Berkom (Openismus), for his work on geometry management
  • Colin Walters (Red Hat), for his work on GtkApplication
  • Ryan Lortie (Codethink), for his work on dconf, GSettings and GtkApplication
  • Javier Jardón, for tireless code, build and documentation cleanup

GTK+ 2.15.3 unstable release

This is the third development release leading up to GTK+ 2.16.
8 bugs fixed in this release!

  • General:
    • Keyboard shortcut handling has been changed, to help with a longstanding complaint about the way GTK+ handles multiple layouts. GTK+ now only uses keys from groups other than the current group if they are not present in the current group. Feedback on this change is appreciated.

Read the original announcement for more info and downloads.

GLib 2.19.6 unstable release

This is the sixth development release leading up to GLib 2.20.
7 bugs fixed in this release!

  • General
    • New format macro to print goffset data: G_OFFSET_FORMAT
  • GIO:
    • Add a GFilter{Input,Output}Stream::close-base-stream properties which determine whether the base stream will be closed when the filter stream is finalized.
    • g_data_input_stream_read_line and …_read_until have asynchronous variants now.

Read the original announcement for more info and downloads.

GTK+ 2.15.1 unstable release

This is the first development release leading up to GTK+ 2.16.
35 bugs fixed in this release!

  • GtkFileChooser:
    • Remember the file chooser’s size across invocations
    • Handle uris that are entered in the entry
    • Improve autocompletion, in particular for uris
  • GtkEntry:
    • New property “im-module” for selecting input methods per-widget
    • New icon-related API got renamed for consistency
    • Added properties and setters for icon tooltips
  • GtkTextView:
    • New property “im-module” for selecting input methods per-widget
    • New signal “paste-done” to allow better handling of async pasting
  • GtkScale:
    • New api to add annotated marks: gtk_scale_add_mark.
  • GtkAction:
    • Rework the way actions and proxies interact, to make the interaction less ad hoc, more extensible, and better suited for support in GUI builders like glade. To be used as a proxy, a widget must now implement the GtkActivatable interface, and GtkActivatable implementations are responsible for syncing their appearance with the action and for activating the action. All the widgets that are commonly used as proxies implement GtkActivatable now. This is a big change, and it is not unlikely to break some current users of GtkAction, so feedback about problems caused by this is appreciated.
    • Add a “gicon” property to specify the icon with a GIcon
  • GDK:
    • On X11, GDK now caches cursors to avoid cursor theming overhead
    • New cursor type for blank cursors: GDK_BLANK_CURSOR
  • New deprecations:
    • gtk_scale_Button_get_orientation()
    • gtk_scale_button_set_orientation()
    • gtk_action_connect_proxy()
    • gtk_action_disconnect_proxy()
    • gtk_widget_get_action()
    • gtk_action_block_activate_from()
    • gtk_action_unblock_activate_from()
    • direct access to “gtk-action” object data
  • Changes that are relevant for translators:
    • Navigation and Media stock labels have separate message contexts now
    • The caps lock warning string has been changed

Read the original announcement for more info and downloads.

GTK+ 2.15.0 unstable release

This is the first development release leading up to GTK+ 2.16.

Overview of changes between 2.14.x and 2.15.0:

  • GtkFileChooser
    • Optionally shows file sizes
    • Mounts volumes when necessary
    • Picks better mime icons
  • GtkEntry
    • Can show icons at either side of the entry, which can be made clickable, drag sources, etc
    • Can show progress information
    • Picks the best available placeholder character for invisible entries unless it is explicitly set. See the invisible-char-set property
    • Input methods work again in invisible entries
    • Invisible entries can optionally display a caps-lock warning. This can be turned off with the caps-lock-warning property
  • GtkStatusIcon
  • GtkLinkButton
    • Respects user-defined tooltips
    • Has a default url hook
  • GtkBuilder
    • Can construct menus
    • Can associate accel groups with windows
    • Child properties can now be translatable, e.g. GtkAssistant::page-title
  • GtkOrientable
    • A new interface implemented by all widgets that have horizontal and vertical variants
    • Printing support
    • Print-to-file can save to non-local files
    • Page rendering can be deferred to a thread to avoid blocking the mainloop
  • GDK
    • GdkKeymap emits a state-changed signal when the Caps Lock state changes
  • Newly deprecated functions:
    • gdk_window_get_toplevels(),
    • gtk_font_selection_dialog_get_apply_button(),
    • gtk_status_icon_set_tooltip(),
    • gtk_toolbar_set_orientation()
  • Changes that are relevant for theme authors
    • The GtkMenu::arrow-placement style property allow more space efficient layout of scrolling menus
    • Submenu arrows can be scaled relative to the font size, with the
    • GtkMenuItem::arrow-scaling style property
    • Themes can set the GtkDialog::content-area-spacing style property to change the spacing between elements of the content area
    • The GtkEntry::state-hint style property can be used to make GTK+ pass the correct state when drawing the background of entries
    • The GtkEntry::prelight style property can be used to suppress prelighting of icons in entries on mouse-over
  • Changes that are relevant for translators
    • GTK+ has been switched to use the two-argument C_() macro instead of Q_() for messages with context

Read the original announcement for more information including bug fixes and download locations.

New Blog for the GTK+ project!

Since updating gtk.org I have had a number of comments and one in particular asked for an RSS they could follow with information and news about GTK+. So, this blog has been set up to do just that.

If there is anyone here that wishes to be added to be able to blog about new and cool things in GTK+, let me know, and I will add you. So far it is just me and soon to be andreas.