Imendio Laboratories

Using a GtkVBox widget is the most common way to show and hide objects in a GTK+ application.
However, the current behavior sometimes feel like watching a illusionist perform a show. Things suddenly appear and disappear in and out of thin air.
Therefore Hagen decided to create some code to animate the GtkVBox widget in these situations.

Hagen describes the process in his blog:

“First I derived from so the original implementation is not touched directly. Then I slightly modified the size_alloc function by saving the computed GtkAllocations and removing direct calls of gtk_widget_size_allocate. I modified add and remove so I can start the animation at the right time. I also added a function called my_vbox_pack_start_n which inserts a widget at a given position so one is able to preserve the original packaging order. You trigger the animation by simply adding or removing widgets to the vertical box as usual.”

You can also watch the higher quality ogg file.

Eager to try it out?
git clone git://github.com/troja84/af.git
and see the files:
tests/myvbox_a.h, tests/myvbox_a.c ,tests/test-vbox-animated.c

Hagen Schink, who currently does his internship here at Imendio is looking into bringing animation to GTK+, building upon the work of Carlos animation framework.

Here is a preview of his current experiments:

You can check out his animation framework branch that contains the code of slider app with:
git clone git://github.com/troja84/af.git

And for Carlos Master branch: git clone git://git.imendio.com/carlos/animation-framework.git

Richard recently added a cool function to Devhelp trunk, which makes Emacs extra helpful when coding, always showing you the documentation you need. It should work well with all gtk-doc generated reference docs (like GTK+ & friends).

Watch the screencast.

You can get hold of devhelp trunk using:
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/devhelp/trunk devhelp
Note that Devhelp trunk requires webkit instead of gecko.

Widget theming have been a tricky beast for way too long. The designers, the ones who are experts in look and feel, currently find it way too hard. We hope to change this.
The Manju project aims at creating graphical widget toolkit themes from SVG files in a toolkit independent fashion.
It combines the idea of a pixmap theme engine, Jimmac’s “One Canvas Workflow”, SVG markup features and Inkscape export functionality to fully automate the creation of a scalable and stretchable pixmap theme from an SVG source.