6 ms·

GTK+ 3.0.0 released

95 points by junkbit 16y ago

zokier 16y ago
Seems like the changes are more behind the scenes -stuff, rather than developer or user visible stuff. While GTK is not my toolkit of choice, grats for evolving and getting a major version out.
ecoffey 16y ago
GTK+ was my first foray into GUI programming when I was a kid, and I still think it's pretty slick. I really liked the concept of boxes and nesting stuff, and how it would figure out how to lay it out. And that it could all be done in code and be understandable! Not some wonky OLE2 / Swing "Form Designer" that I was doomed to never understand.
- randrews 16y ago
  Actually Swing works pretty much the same way, which is why I liked it. What I couldn't stand was stuff like Qt, which wants to generate / pre-process a lot of code. I've decided my rule is, I want to either do everything in code (like GTK) or nothing in code (like Cocoa), but none of this "here's a utility that generates code for you" like Windows Forms.
  - killedbydeath 16y ago
    To me the Qt and Cocoa approaches look the same. Qt is built on top of C++ pretty much the same way Objective-C is built on top of C: there is some syntactic sugar to allow dynamic binding and you do not ever have to look at the intermediate results if you do not want to. You can hack into the details of the implementation if you prefer, and you can do it in both frameworks.
  - andrewf 16y ago
    I think they really cleaned this up in the Qt3 -> Qt4 transition - your Qt Designer forms are still turned into code, but not in a generated file that you're supposed to edit. Instead it's a standalone class that you inherit in your own class. So uic and moc are still there, but they may as well be generating object code - you never have to read the C++ that they spit out.
  - jdub 16y ago
    You can go down the "nothing in code" route with GTK+ as well, using Glade to generate UI description files. :-)
tobylane 16y ago
Does this have anything to do with Ubuntu release schedules? It's either two months after this, or after X.org which came out on 20th Dec.
- windsurfer 16y ago
  Ubuntu's releases are a month after Gnome, which is a month after X.org. GTK+ is related to Gnome, but does not follow Gnome's release schedule.
windsurfer 16y ago
Multiple pointer support is huge. It now means GTK+ can be used on mobile applications and support gestures. CSS themeing means themes can be created by designers more readily. This should mean more and better themes in the future.
malkia 16y ago
I've tried compiling it for Windows (using msvc, instead of mingw), but failed. Anyone knowns precompiled binaries for windows (even mingw should be fine, they link to KERNEL32.lib, and are binary compatible with MS).
- endgame 16y ago
  Looks like the gtk.org all-in-one bundle hasn't yet been updated. If you're feeling bold, you could try and get a build going with MinGW+MSYS.
kjksf 16y ago
I think GTK+ shows how an open-source community can paint itself into a corner by becoming "too big to fail". Gtk+ 1.0 was released in in 1998. Here's a list of vastly superior UI toolkits that were developed from scratch before Gtk+ 3.0 release: * Microsoft's WPF (first release in 2006) * Android's Java-based UI framework * Palm's webOS UI framework * Cocoa in Mac OS X (first release in 2001 - and before you nitpick, I know it was based on earlier tech from NeXT) * iPhone UI (granted, based on Mac OS X UI but a lot of it was new) The technology behind Gtk+ (C, even when written in a disciplined, object-oriented fashion) makes it painful to program against. It was fine when the alternative was Win32 but the above mentioned toolkits use higher-level languages (java, c#, javascript, objective-c) making them not only easier to program against but also easier to improve the toolkits themselves. I don't follow Gnome development but my outsider perspective is that Gtk+ is a huge technical debt and there are no signs that the community is planning to ditch it for something that can go head-to-head with those other technologies (mono is the only initiative trying to move the state of the art of implementation technologies on unix but it doesn't have UI component (other than silverlight implementation, which is WPF-lite)).
- roel_v 16y ago
  Gtk is to my knowledge the first toolkit one could make a whole UI with, dynamic resizing and all, dynamically (from XML files loaded at runtime), using a graphical editor (Glade), and all of that since at least 2000 (I know I submitted some patches to it back then). No toolkit today replicates the same ease of development. Gtk has many binding to various languages, and is relatively well-documented. Why has it not been successful? Well IMO because of several reasons: deep dependency on X, making its use on Windows a kludge at best; hostility in the community to making it viable for commercial use (basically, polishing it enough for integration, and willingness to compromise design purity for integration with native widgets), and the horrendous plague that seems to be the bane of many open source products that focus on Linux: how hard it is to compile, the many dependencies, not providing easy to use complete packages for Windows, ... On Linux it's no issue, you've got all dependencies already and otherwise your distro takes care of it. On Window you need(ed?) to download 5+ various packages with different build systems, somehow integrate them (with different build systems) into your build, and if you wanted to use C++ you needed an extra 3 or 4 (for gtkmm); and then the result was still a second-rate citizen on Windows. Plus there was the senseless bickering between Gnome and KDE (yes yes, competition is healthy, blah - if I had a penny for every hour wasted on that, I'd retire on the spot), the 'GTK = C' FUD, and the lack of people who wanted to go the extra mile of making a produkt rather than a nice proof of concept. The people familiar with it didn't care to make it easier for others, GUI tools were considered to be for 'pussies' and 'VB programmers' and so the self-righteous dogmatist make himself irrelevant by being surpassed by products who didn't think themselves above the average programmer. I'm still a bit bitter, at the time I was so much cleaner to write GTK application than moc-infested QT code (yes I know things have changed).

95 points by junkbit 16y ago

Seems like the changes are more behind the scenes -stuff, rather than developer or user visible stuff. While GTK is not my toolkit of choice, grats for evolving and getting a major version out.

ecoffey 16y ago

GTK+ was my first foray into GUI programming when I was a kid, and I still think it's pretty slick. I really liked the concept of boxes and nesting stuff, and how it would figure out how to lay it out. And that it could all be done in code and be understandable! Not some wonky OLE2 / Swing "Form Designer" that I was doomed to never understand.

randrews 16y ago
Actually Swing works pretty much the same way, which is why I liked it. What I couldn't stand was stuff like Qt, which wants to generate / pre-process a lot of code. I've decided my rule is, I want to either do everything in code (like GTK) or nothing in code (like Cocoa), but none of this "here's a utility that generates code for you" like Windows Forms.
- killedbydeath 16y ago
  To me the Qt and Cocoa approaches look the same. Qt is built on top of C++ pretty much the same way Objective-C is built on top of C: there is some syntactic sugar to allow dynamic binding and you do not ever have to look at the intermediate results if you do not want to. You can hack into the details of the implementation if you prefer, and you can do it in both frameworks.
- andrewf 16y ago
  I think they really cleaned this up in the Qt3 -> Qt4 transition - your Qt Designer forms are still turned into code, but not in a generated file that you're supposed to edit. Instead it's a standalone class that you inherit in your own class. So uic and moc are still there, but they may as well be generating object code - you never have to read the C++ that they spit out.
- jdub 16y ago
  You can go down the "nothing in code" route with GTK+ as well, using Glade to generate UI description files. :-)

tobylane 16y ago

Does this have anything to do with Ubuntu release schedules? It's either two months after this, or after X.org which came out on 20th Dec.

windsurfer 16y ago
Ubuntu's releases are a month after Gnome, which is a month after X.org. GTK+ is related to Gnome, but does not follow Gnome's release schedule.

windsurfer 16y ago

Multiple pointer support is huge. It now means GTK+ can be used on mobile applications and support gestures. CSS themeing means themes can be created by designers more readily. This should mean more and better themes in the future.

malkia 16y ago

I've tried compiling it for Windows (using msvc, instead of mingw), but failed. Anyone knowns precompiled binaries for windows (even mingw should be fine, they link to KERNEL32.lib, and are binary compatible with MS).

endgame 16y ago
Looks like the gtk.org all-in-one bundle hasn't yet been updated. If you're feeling bold, you could try and get a build going with MinGW+MSYS.

kjksf 16y ago

I think GTK+ shows how an open-source community can paint itself into a corner by becoming "too big to fail". Gtk+ 1.0 was released in in 1998. Here's a list of vastly superior UI toolkits that were developed from scratch before Gtk+ 3.0 release: * Microsoft's WPF (first release in 2006) * Android's Java-based UI framework * Palm's webOS UI framework * Cocoa in Mac OS X (first release in 2001 - and before you nitpick, I know it was based on earlier tech from NeXT) * iPhone UI (granted, based on Mac OS X UI but a lot of it was new) The technology behind Gtk+ (C, even when written in a disciplined, object-oriented fashion) makes it painful to program against. It was fine when the alternative was Win32 but the above mentioned toolkits use higher-level languages (java, c#, javascript, objective-c) making them not only easier to program against but also easier to improve the toolkits themselves. I don't follow Gnome development but my outsider perspective is that Gtk+ is a huge technical debt and there are no signs that the community is planning to ditch it for something that can go head-to-head with those other technologies (mono is the only initiative trying to move the state of the art of implementation technologies on unix but it doesn't have UI component (other than silverlight implementation, which is WPF-lite)).

roel_v 16y ago
Gtk is to my knowledge the first toolkit one could make a whole UI with, dynamic resizing and all, dynamically (from XML files loaded at runtime), using a graphical editor (Glade), and all of that since at least 2000 (I know I submitted some patches to it back then). No toolkit today replicates the same ease of development. Gtk has many binding to various languages, and is relatively well-documented. Why has it not been successful? Well IMO because of several reasons: deep dependency on X, making its use on Windows a kludge at best; hostility in the community to making it viable for commercial use (basically, polishing it enough for integration, and willingness to compromise design purity for integration with native widgets), and the horrendous plague that seems to be the bane of many open source products that focus on Linux: how hard it is to compile, the many dependencies, not providing easy to use complete packages for Windows, ... On Linux it's no issue, you've got all dependencies already and otherwise your distro takes care of it. On Window you need(ed?) to download 5+ various packages with different build systems, somehow integrate them (with different build systems) into your build, and if you wanted to use C++ you needed an extra 3 or 4 (for gtkmm); and then the result was still a second-rate citizen on Windows. Plus there was the senseless bickering between Gnome and KDE (yes yes, competition is healthy, blah - if I had a penny for every hour wasted on that, I'd retire on the spot), the 'GTK = C' FUD, and the lack of people who wanted to go the extra mile of making a produkt rather than a nice proof of concept. The people familiar with it didn't care to make it easier for others, GUI tools were considered to be for 'pussies' and 'VB programmers' and so the self-righteous dogmatist make himself irrelevant by being surpassed by products who didn't think themselves above the average programmer. I'm still a bit bitter, at the time I was so much cleaner to write GTK application than moc-infested QT code (yes I know things have changed).