A Little Help Needed.

[Vinodh Dorai Rajan <vinny matsvin com>]

Hi,
	First off , sorry this mail should actually go to gtk+ mailing list , 
but since I am not yet subscribed to it and needed a quick help , I 
decided to send it here. Besides I am writing a GNOME app.

	The problem is gtk_editable_get_chars. How do I know if the user has not 
entered any text in the entrybox. I dont seem to be getting a NULL 
pointer back. This is based on gtk+1.2.8-0_helix_1 on a rh6.2 box. strlen 
also doesnt return 0 (obviously). There doesnt seem to be any doc on 
getting the no of chars in an entry box. Can someone tellme how can I 
detect null strings without touching the struct members.

	BTW the app that I am writing is an addressbook called Aries. I had 
quite a few problems with gnomecard and so I decided to write my own 
addressbook using xml as the file format, (I desperately needed a 
reliable contact manager). While gnomecard looked great , unfortunately 
it corrupted my data all the time. And I wanted to learn gtk+ and GNOME 
programming. Have done quite a lot of KDE programming and so this 
presented me with a nice oppurtunity to learn GNOME programming.

	Aries will have a plugin arch to import and export and I plan to make it 
a bonobo component and CORBA server so that it can straightaway give out 
to: cc: bcc: entries for an email client thus integrating itself 
completely with GNOME. Are there any standards in GNOME for integrating 
an addressbook and an email client ?.

Regards

Vinny