Bling in GTK+
Got back on Sunday from a great Guadec in a rainy Birmingham. I felt that there was a lot more energy around this year than last year with a lot of discussions on how to improve our platform. (Thanks Apple for the timely released phone 
)
One thing that a lot of people were talking about was the need for bling in GTK+. At this stage it’s mostly generic ideas that we need to improve in that area and I definitely agree. And we really need to get hackers and UI designers together to discuss what kind of features and bling that we are missing.
One misconception that we see a lot is that people seems to think that just because the stock widgets are all pretty static and square it means that any application that uses GTK+ will be. One of GTK+’s strengths is that it is very versatile and customizable (especially compared to a lot of other toolkits out there).
As a quick proof of concept I used Carlos GtkTimeline (#444659) to create a simple slide animation for switching between to widgets in a similar way that the iphone slides in pages from the side.
(OGG)
Is this the start of a gnome animation library ?
Good work.
It is about time
So GtkTimeline should become part of the next GTK+ release. Together with convolution filters in cairo and windowless widgets, this would support quite some bling in our desktop.
Am a fan of Carlos’ GtkTimeline work.
This is the kind of organic steps that we can take to improve Gtk+ without the need to boil the ocean.
Miguel.
Let the experiments begin! I like this stuff!
Are those people crazy? GTK IS bling!
The fact that I can have all of the fonts on my desktop, however I want them, via a single desktop-wide setting, without injuring any of the user interface, puts GTK at the very top of my bling charts.
Nice example of how to add even more
I have seen some pretty cool things done just by animating GTK’s normal widgets, and I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.