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GTK+ 2.0

Posted by michael on from the purty-pictures dept.

Some random reader sent in: "Gtk.org all of a sudden (?) says version 2.0 is available. There is a FAQ for 2.0. Here is a mail from the gtk-devel-list with some 'pre-release release-notes' :)."

11 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Wow.. by Warped-Reality · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I tried the devel branch for 2.0 not too long ago, it turned out to be hideously unstable... have they really fixed all of those bugs in such a short period of time?

    --
    This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
    1. Re:Wow.. by chabotc · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actualy, yes a amazing amount of bugs have been fixed in the last months and weeks. Ofcource it is worth keeping in mind this is a .0 release. So all critical bugs should've been found and fixed, but there's bound to be a slew of little ones left.

      More exiting though, is the fact that they can now begin on the next gtk release, which amongst other things will include a new file selector (open / save, etc) dialog ! This is something that a _lot_ of users are hoping and waiting for.

      (check http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002 -March/msg00179.html for notes on the file selector.

    2. Re:Wow.. by spudnic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The main three things that annoy me about many open/save dialogs that I encounter are the inability to create new directories, no tab (or some other) completion, and the inconsistancies between them. Sure, let all the folks create their own systems, but at least create a common API at some level so that if I'm using a KDE app in Gnome I get the standard Gnome open save dialogs.

      It really shouldn't be that hard, especially for something as simple as this.

      Now don't even get me started on clipboards... ;)

      --
      load "linux",8,1
    3. Re:Wow.. by Havoc+Pennington · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Some quick bugzilla.gnome.org queries would demonstrate with hard evidence that you are
      incorrect, if anyone were interested in reality.
      Wait, this is Slashdot. ;-)

      (Apparently I'm in an answer-the-trolls mood...)

  2. Excellent! But... by Emil+Brink · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug), I see this is very good news, of course. But whoa, it's going to be a lot of work porting over... Using the deprecated widgets is an impossibility for any self-respecting maintainer, imo. ;^) Also, I sure do hope they managed to get the speed up a bit from the 1.3.x series... That was really underwhelming. Which was sad, since 1.2.x is very snappy.

    --
    main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
    1. Re:Excellent! But... by Emil+Brink · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, now I've downloaded all the four libs and actually stresed my machine through building and installing it. The classic testgtk application that serves as a rather comprehensive demo of the various capabilities program is still around. And it's not anti-aliased on my machine (no xft, as far as I know), so even if turning that off helps, I'm still not happy. It's really annoying, since there's not that much visible improvement, although I'm sure everything is nice and new under the hood.

      While typing this up, I had this brilliant idea: there are these things known as "benchmarks" which replace vague bitching with hard numbers... Aha!

      I dove into the testgtk.c source, for both this new 2.0.0 release, and the last stable release, 1.2.10. In the "clist" demo (which is very interesting to me, since my app (mentioned in the thread root) uses GtkCList heavily), I added simple instrumentation to measure the time to add 1,000 rows with pixmaps. The results, based on running the code 10 times, dropping the min and max, and averaging the remaining 8 values:

      • GTK+ 1.2.10: 0.081 s
      • GTK+ 2.0.0: 0.787 s
      Difference: a factor of 9.6 slower. Ouch. Oh, and please note that these times are for the "core" loop of the test case, which is enclosed in calls to gtk_clist_freeze() and gtk_clist_thaw(), meaning (afaik) that this does not include the time it takes for GTK+ to actually render the list. It's the internal bookkeeping only. Can you say "dramatically slower"? I know I can.

      The annoying thing with this 10X performance loss is that my next machine isn't all that likely to be 10X faster than my current one; it's simply too large a step. Bummer.

      There, I think I've ranted enough on the topic for this moment. Thanks for listening. :^)

      --
      main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
  3. Real (draft) release notes by tal197 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The linked message only talks about proposed changes to the draft release notes... here are the release notes themselves (also draft):

    Draft release notes for Gtk

  4. New font system by tal197 · · Score: 5, Informative
    One of the main new features is the completely new font system:
    • Everything is in UTF-8 (so no more charset headaches :-)
    • AA fonts using XRENDER (do GDK_USE_XFT=1; export GDK_USE_XFT in your .xsession to enable them).
    • Sane font-chooser dialog, where you just select the font name, weight and size, instead of the previous multi-paned mess.
    • Lots of routines for laying out paragraphs, positioning text cursors, etc, for people doing their own text layout.

    On the negative side, the new font system seems much slower than before. Also it's completely incompatible with Gtk+-1.2, so anyone working with fonts has a massive updating task ahead.

    One cool new feature is that the default font is stored on the display, using the new XSettings system. This means that when you run a program on a remote machine, or as another user, etc, you don't lose your settings.

  5. GTK 'plus' by Ed+Avis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    With the version number jump, you'd think they would have taken the opportunity to rename it from GTK+ back to GTK, which is what everyone calls it anyway.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  6. Re:What about the Win32 port ? by Havoc+Pennington · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, that's correct. The win32 version is not yet
    released though, it's just in "preview" status. Should be out in a few months.

  7. In Related News... by suwalski · · Score: 4, Informative

    news.gnome.org is reporting that Gnome Beta 2 ("I bastun bor vi allihopa!") is out!