Slashdot Mirror
Glade 2 Tutorial
Renartthefox writes "Rikke D. Giles has written a new tutorial for Glade II. Glade is a program designed to enable the quick building of graphical user interfaces for GTK+ and GNOME applications. However, it can be used with any desktop environment in linux, as long as the GTK+ and/or GNOME libraries are installed."
If I'm not wrong, glade files can also be importd in qt designer (qt's gui builder). Nice work.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Getting rid of xul(xml user interface language) would be good for responsive gui.
Where's the pdf/ps/etc? Ok, I know, pdfs are not GNU, but still. I like reading tutorials in paper form rather than html. I'm sure there is a way for "rapid" translation.
Can we have articles like this listed and catalogued in a single place somewhere ?
If I happen to be wanting to learn Glade 2 now, this article will be really useful. Otherwise, I could bookmark it for future reference (assuming it'll still be there in a few months time) - or download it, and save it on a directory somewhere.
What about having somewhere such as the Linux Documentation Project keep a collection of articles like this (or keep a list of dated bookmarks to useful external articles) - simultaneously making both the Linux Documentation Project, and the articles in links to, more useful resources to more people.
Too bad Quartz Extreme isn't actually "an OpenGL-accelerated desktop." It only accelerates compositing (window effects), so it's not in the same league as stuff like the Longhorn UI or E17's EVAS, which can actually use OpenGL to accelerate visually complex drawing. Also, Apple's implementation isn't that great. It stores huge bitmaps everywhere, even though DisplayPDF is inherently vector based, and as mentioned above, doesn't take good advantage of the capabilities of current cards. For example, it won't accelerate line drawing, because current cards can only do AA line drawing through OpenGL, which Quartz2D doesn't use.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nonetheless, I work with Glade on weekends for fun. Here are some other interesting links that you'll undoubtedly enjoy:
http://developer.gnome.org/
http://www.daa.com.au/~james/pygtk/
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~jlof/gtkglarea/
But what Linux needs is a fresh look and a fresh batch of research into creating a truly intuitive desktop computing experience.
Windows isn't intuitive, but because it's so popular, people have had to learn how to get work done and consistent interfaces across Microsoft applications helps this.
But if Linux hackers want a new crowd of free software users, they need to attract them not only with the low price of open source software, but a high intuitivity index of the software itself.
Someone please make Linux more easy to use. It's too hard.
Something strange is happening here. I am not seeing any kind of adverse effect to the machine from being slashdotted. Its chugging along fine, happily serving up pages.
/proc/cpuinfo
Hmm, must be some kind of multi GHz Quad Processor heavy iron type of box, right?
Nope.
P75, 48megs of ram. No kidding.
cat
model : Pentium 75+
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
bogomips : 40.04
Granted, I'm only seeing 109 current connections to the web server right now. But its running just fine. This is probably mostly due to our colocation hosts at VDomainHosting having enough available bandwidth to serve things up in a timely manner. Thanks guys!
And thanks to Rikke for such a great tutorial. She presented it a few weeks ago at the Linux Fest NW event, to a packed room.
Brian
KPLUG Webmaster
Remember Lexington Green!
I learned about glade by trying DIASCE2, a Visual IDE for Glade. Before Glade I couldn't grok automake, pkg-config, much less GTK; by writing a simple Hello Glade World I grokked it all, wrote my own build scripts, and started writing Gnome apps.
Glade was only a stepping stone for me to using the raw GTK api. I find GTK in C to be quite elegant. The only real wart I found is that Popped-up menus are reparented in a fake GtkWindow, where as top levels aren't. Baring that, raw GTK in C is good enough for me.
"The world is fundamentally functional and relational." -- Quote from a grayheaded Silicon Valley dude, there's wisdom.
It's a very good thing they didn't try to make an IDE, because one already exists: Anjuta. And best of all, Anjuta not only offers all the usual editor/compiler mumbo-jumbo, but it also calls Glade for GUI creation.
If you're trying to start out GNOME/GTK development, Anjuta's the IDE of choice (as far as I can see). Of course, all I did in it was make a little "Hello, world!" app that would hide the message when you click a button. But it was very simple to make and had full i18n support -- for 5 minutes from start to finish, that's not half-bad :).
Unfortunately, it's still put to shame by MSDN. The docs are sometimes missing, sometimes wrong..... when I encounter these things I write a patch and submit it, it only takes a few minutes, and if more people did it the docs would improve faster.
The docs for the GNOME libs though are a bit poor, but the same could be said of KDE, a lot of it is out of date, too sparse etc.
Really, at some point Linux needs to leave its fascination with SGML/DocBook behind. I hate it for so many reasons. It really sucks. A custom solution I think could do what DocBook does better, faster and with less hassle.
It'd be nice to have better searching as cross referencing as well. DevHelp is OK but rather buggy (I'm thinking of trying to fix a few of those bugs this week). As ever, I'd love to try and fix them, I like the technologies, but I have little time and other projects take higher priority. Really somebody just needs to be contracted to work on them for a bit, a developer support role perhaps. If there are any companies out there who want to use GTK for their apps but want proper developer support, get in touch!