gtkmm

Lost of people use gtkmm for in-house stuff so we don’t get to see it. But I recently found this screenshot of a gtkmm-based GUI that controls an animatronic puppet in this article about Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (muppets, etc). It’s old so maybe people have seen it before.

gc announced that gtkmm will be in the next release of Mandrake Linux – it’s already in the unstable “cooker” thing. I’m still hoping that RedHat will respond to a little desperate customer demand – please don’t “me too”.

My DSL is delayed again, and might never happen, so patches are building up in bugzilla. The more this goes on the more people will help. Some people are already. At least it encourages people to submit finished patches knowing that I won’t have time to fix things for them. danielk, the other gtkmm maintainer is resurfacing, so that should help.

At least I have somewhere to live now – a cute little Haueschen near the centre of Linz.

Rabid Qtism

I can’t seem to post to LinuxToday without Guillaume repeating the same old arguments – see the comments. He’ll reply to this now. I generally stop replying to his replies after a while but I think it might be fun to see just how much he’s willing to repeat himself. I still don’t know why he bothers. His conclusions are interesting, because I also have lots of experience with lots of proprietary APIs and I’ve generally found that they are inept – so I concluded that stuff goes bad if nobody looks at it. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Actually I think that one of Guillaume’s main problems is that he’s still working with old memories of GTK+ 1.2, and doesn’t realize that, unlike Qt, GTK+ and gtkmm were able to improve their APIs over time instead of stagnating.

I do get pissed off when Guillaume or others say that he’s someone who knows all about gtkmm and
decided that it couldn’t work. Firstly, gtkmm 2 clearly did work. But more importantly (and I’ve tried to avoid saying it until this provoked), Guillaume wasn’t ever all that involved. It wasn’t his fault because gtkmm 1.2 wasn’t that clear, but he really didn’t understand gtkmm – none of us did. It’s all better now. He did maintain the libgnomeui bindings (the old, smaller, gnomemm) but he didn’t do a good job, and I brought that API to stability.

Ars Electronica

I visited this techy museum thingy in Linz. It has some fun, simple, stuff in it, but the experience is ruined by the dot-com-era descriptions of the exhibits. Sometimes things are just fun things. And sometimes things are just pretty colors. Their VR Cave is a bit dismal. It would have been quite impressive 5 years ago but a laptop can do a lot more these days.

And anyway, I was expecting a giant electronic arse.