digital home of MacSlow

What style of GtkEntry/SpinButton/ComboBoxEntry do you like better?

Example A

Example B

As promised the source to these examples…

(click for full size)

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~macslow/gtk-offscreen-1/trunk gtk-offscreen-1
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~macslow/gtk-gl-offscreen-1/trunk gtk-gl-offscreen-1
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~macslow/gtk-gl-offscreen-2/trunk gtk-gl-offscreen-2
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~macslow/gtk-gl-rgba-1/trunk gtk-gl-rgba-1

If you have gtk+ 2.12.x, libglade 2.6.x and gtkglext 1.0.6 and their respective development files installed, the not so usual…

./autogen.sh ; make

… in each directory will create the binaries. They all work under metacity, but usually look nicer under compiz.

This stuff is still very rough around the edges, so you will certainly run into one or more issues. But that last sentence probably nobody will ever read *sigh*

… it even works with RGBA-visuals.

(click for full size)

Although I hardly use blender myself (maybe once or twice a month I start it up and try something), I am always very interested in the latest advances the blender development-team implements. The amount and quality of improvements blender gains from the OpenMovie-projects (“Elephants Dream” was the first one) is always very impressive. The latest additions to blender seem to be rendering-features for advanced fur- and particle-effects.

(external article and image/png)

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If you have a faible for computer animation à la Pixar - not implying the OpenMovie-projects can rival that level yet - you should definitely check out the whole blog about the current/second OpenMovie-project “Peach”. It is filled with lots of video-reports from the production and development of this latest flic produced by the Blender Foundation. I am very much looking forward to this one.

Integration is the new “innovation”. This integration can happen at different levels. Usually people think of integrated APIs and library-frameworks. That kind of integration is what makes a platform feel elegant and sophisticated in the eyes of a software-engineer working on such a platform. An end-user will never ever get in touch with this sort of integration. He or she obtains their impression of a system via the visual integration or the interaction of different programs forming a solid entity.

Gosh, what am I just pulling out of my a** there… sorry

Actually I want to pick up where I left here and much earlier during the unprepared session at FOSSCamp. For some things I’m implementing (e.g. a face-browser for gdm), I need to be able to truely mix gtk+-widgets and OpenGL in a seamless way. To this day neither pigment nor clutter provide the kind of integration I want. The approach I’m using takes gtk+-widget-trees (placed inside a GtkEventBox) loaded from glade-files, redirects them to offscreen-rendering, generates GL-textures using GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap and finally animates them to my hearts content in GL.

Those who want to play around with this, will find the sourcecode in a day or two on launchpad. I’ll post the links to the bzr-repos here on my blog once they are ready.

What works…

• respects themeing
• respects widget-resizing
• any widget or widget-tree can be animated in this way
• works with stock gtk+ shipping with major distributions (e.g. Ubuntu 7.10)
• works under metacity and compiz

Remaining issues…

• input redirection at the toolkit-level
• update-lag after theme-change
• integration inside gtk+ itself, instead of application-level code
• or adding this to clutter/pigment

The obligatory screencast…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~6.4 MBytes)

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~23.3 MBytes)

Elsewhere - in Italy to be more precise - Andrea Cimitan, the author of the murrine gtk+-theme engine, has been busy too. Asking me some questions once in a while, our recent chats lead to something very slick. He went wild with the upcoming murrine-0.60. See for yourself…

P.S.: My gtk+-widgets on OpenGL also work with that new murrine theme… just in case you might have wondered