Openismus contributions to GTK+

Openismus has made several contributions to GTK+ recently, getting changes into the upstream releases, doing things properly via bugzilla and the mailing lists, working with other developers even when it’s complicated, so it’s done right. This has helped my application, Glom, which uses GTK+ via gtkmm. It shows that we could do the same for you.

For some of our employees this is also a slight reward for being so busy coding with Qt right now. We love GTK+ as much as ever, regardless of one big company’s arbitrary choice to stop using it. Some of us like it even more now.

A short list of recent Openismus work on GTK+:

Tristan also created a couple of useful container widgets that were not needed in GTK+ itself so they are now in libegg. They were made possible by the extended layout support in GTK+ 3.

  • EggWrapBox
    By Tristan. This positions child widgets in sequence according to its orientation. For instance, with the horizontal orientation, the widgets will be arranged from left to right, starting a new row under the previous row when necessary, as in a toolbar or tool palette.
  • EggSpreadTable (screenshots)
    By Tristan and ported back to libegg by our David King. This positions its children by distributing them as evenly as possible across a fixed number of rows or columns, like newspaper columns.

8 thoughts on “Openismus contributions to GTK+

  1. Those are great contributions, thanks to Openismus! It’s nice to have a summary like this one to show how GTK+ development is alive, and pushed by various groups working together!

  2. What is Openismus’s view, as a corporate entity, of the role of corporate copyright assignment from non-corporate contributors? Does Openismus as a corporate entity feel blanket copyright assignment to a central for-profit entity helps or hurts the creation of successful project?

    -jef

    1. Jeft, Openismus doesn’t have an official company opinion about copyright assignment, because it doesn’t need to have one yet. Personally, I think it’s obviously an obstacle, even just because it makes people have to think about it. And I don’t think it’s worth it to the companies who try to use it. I don’t see what this has to do with my blog post.

  3. I think it would be useful to share experiences (good and bad) of using both toolkits, what can we do to improve our platform, what it is easier to do in our platform and what it is not, etc. That might help us not only to improve our platform but also to fight against myths.

    1. German, no, I don’t think the world needs yet another useless commentary. There is little value in directly comparing GTK+ and Qt. One is C and one is C++. No other differences are remotely as relevant. People will choose their toolkit based on the language used. And then it’s all just about personal preferences. That discussion has been going steady for 30 years with no sign of resolution, regardless of toolkits. If it looks otherwise to you then you are probably taking a too-narrow and short-sighted view of things based on limited information.

      I like C++ so I like gtkmm, but I wouldn’t tell all programmers that the will be most productive with gtkmm or Qt. Programmers are most productive when they are happy, which means letting them work with what they prefer, though they’ll never all prefer the same thing.

      1. Murray,

        I think you misunderstood me. To say it in other words, when you used gitorious you discovered features that we lack in our infrastructure and you wondered why we do not have something like that. So, the idea is not to compare the toolkits, it is to share (in public or private) what we can learn from others (i.e. “these guys have gotten this approach very good and we could learn from this, otoh, I think we have gotten this other approach better a no need for improvement is needed on that side”). If you were sharing your experience in Android I would have asked you the same.

        If you think there is nothing to learn from other toolkits you have worked with, that is ok, too.

        1. I assume that you were being hypothetical about gitorious. There’s little that I like about it.

          But really, there isn’t much on the Qt side that I’d personally miss if I didn’t have to use Qt. On the contrary, there are so many things that we wish could be improved when we use it in daily work, but, unlike GNOME, it’s very hard to make those changes. But I’m clearly biased so I don’t think my opinions are very helpful.

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