Up North

Somewhat back to normal routines after a week in beautiful Istanbul. As people reading Planet GNOME have seen from others, it was a great Guadec this year.

I found the schedule to be a bit uninspiring but that left more time for discussions and hacking. Among the sessions I went to I really enjoyed going to Alp’s session about Webkit and Blizzards on Mozilla. Some really interesting things coming from these projects.

Kris did a great job wrapping up the current state in GTK+ during his now traditional ‘GTK+ State of the Union’ talk and happy to see that the discussion around future GTK+ is getting started throughout the community. I spent a lot of time this year talking and listening to peoples feedback on the proposed plans. Realized that some things have been a bit left out from the discussions after the hackfest and that we need to do a better job at communicating what we plan to work on besides the cleanups and enabling of future development.

Finally a warm welcome to Stormy as executive director of the GNOME Foundation Board.

I ran into a slight problem when I tried to create a type registered subclass in Ruby/GTK+. This is done by adding type_register in your class definition. This worked fine until I tried to pass arguments to the super class constructor through the super() call.

In my previous example, I passed the arguments like usual to the super call. It turns out that when you have registered your class with the GObject type system (which I didn’t do in that example) it overloads the super() call and you need to pass the arguments as a hash instead.

Here is an example subclassing Gtk::Button that sets the button up defaulting to underline mnemonics.

require 'gtk2'

class MyButton < Gtk::Button
  type_register

  def initialize(label)
    super({:label => label, :use_underline => true})
  end

  def signal_do_clicked(*args)
    puts “Clicked”
  end
end

w = Gtk::Window.new

b = MyButton.new(”My _Button”)
w.add(b)

w.signal_connect(:delete_event) do
  Gtk.main_quit
end

w.show_all
Gtk.main

Kudos to Kou for showing how to do it.

It’s not only in the upstream GTK+ project that there has been a lot of happenings lately. The Ruby GTK+ bindings team got a new maintainer after the old maintainer Masao Mutoh decided to step down and turn the reins over to .

Kouhei seems set on doing a new, much anticipated release of the bindings as soon as possible. The last release was done over a year ago (2006-12-29) and a lot of improvements have been done after.

I’d like to extend my thanks to both Masao and Kouhei for their efforts and willingness to take care of maintaining the bindings for this excellent language.

I also raised the question about moving the project over to GNOMEs infrastructure to get closer to upstream development and make it easier for people to participate. The suggestion seems to have been well received and many have said that they would love that. I’m pretty sure it would put some more light on the project and help the continued development positively.