Re: GEP 6: Toolbar

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Andres Salomon wrote:

> Overall, it looks like a very clean solution.  I would love to see what
> you have planned for GtkToolItem.
[snip]

> The option to iterate over the list of toolitems would remain, I would hope..
Well, the tool items are simply children of the toolbar.  You can 
iterate over them with gtk_container_foreach().  As far as iteration 
APIs go, it might be nice to have something like Joel Becker's GIterator 
available ...

> How about an "align" enumeration, in each GtkToolItem; normal/middle, left,
> and right?  GtkToolBar reminds me a lot of an HTML table row; being able
> to specify alignment, the number of cells a toolitem will take up,
> etc...
Can you be a bit more specific about this?  Is there a particular layout 
you are trying to achieve?

> There's another option as well; have the toolbar be a scrolled window,
> w/ GTK_POLICY_AUTOMATIC for vertical/horizontal scrollbar.  Any overflow
> (horizontal or vertical) will cause the creation of scrollbars.  I like
> the idea of this better than an arrow button, as the arrow may be missed
> w/ a cursory glance.  I'm not familiar w/ bonobo, so I'm not sure what
> the panel would look like, but I would think scrollbars would be obvious
> and non-intrusive (but not necessarily pretty).
This could be difficult to implement, as it requires height-for-width 
style geometry management, which isn't handled well in GTK+ (as you 
shrink the width of the toolbar, at some point you would need to 
increase the height to accomodate the scrollbar).

My personal opinion here is that there is more value in doing what other 
systems do here.  It is a reasonable behaviour, and will help users who 
move between platforms.  I will have to get the opinion of the usability 
folks on this one.

If you want an example of the bonobo behaviour, Gnumeric has fair sized 
toolbars and uses Bonobo, so you could try resizing a Gnumeric window to 
make its toolbar overflow.

James.

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