Re: CrackPipe [was: Re: Legacy apps and themes]

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

On Sun, 2003-04-27 at 13:52, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Andrew Sobala">
> 
> > Basically it reads an XML file of what keys to generate a user interface
> > for and sticks them in a dialog. Currently supports text, file and boolean
> > (checkbox-style) keys.
> 
> Someone else did a similar thing a while back, called CoG, but it's not the
> infamous Crackpipe either. The idea behind Crackpipe was not to be a
> half-arsed gconf-editor (that's essentially what you've described, and what
> CoG was, sorry to be blunt)

Looking at http://art.gnome.org/images/screenshots/COG-Shot.png, and the
real thing, it doesn't look so dissimilar to our own capplets. I don't
know what you are envisaging.

> -> it was meant to be a nice, reasonably pretty,
> TweakUI-style [1] preferences dialogue.

Does anyone have any decent screenshots?

> You can't automagically generate something like that. :-)

It's not automagic.

You describe the user-interface in XML - not just what keys to use,
although it's based around linking keys to UI elements. Think glade, but
instead of arsing about trying to get tables HIG-compliant and then
binding gconf callbacks to all the widgets, you just generate a decent
dialog from it. And it's not as hard as it sounds. But it doesn't work
properly yet.

btw, I _am_ developing crackpipe even if the current implementation has
to be thrown away. So if people would explain what the difference
between crackpipe and a super-advanced-crack-capplet is, it would be
really helpful.

-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>

"A freudian slip is when you say one thing but you mean your mother." -- unknown