Re: Announcing: Project Ridley

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

John Luke <john luke gmail com> writes:

> Hello,
> Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> 
> >Now that GTK+-2.8.0 is out, the GTK+ team would like to announce Project
> >Ridley.
> >
> >
> Maybe a dock widget and/or a property editor can also be considered
> for inclusion in GTK+
> as they are getting duplicated in a few places.  These would be
> particularly useful for IDE's and
> other development tools (like glade) but perhaps too specialized to be
> in GTK+ itself.

The Ridley wiki page does have GnomeApp listed as being targeted, though
as of now, there's no plan for it and no one has signed up to work on
it.

Part of the problem here is that it's not really clear what the dock
should be like.  Different applications use docks in different ways --
compare an office application to an IDE.  The former just uses the dock
to handle toolbars[1], while the latter has all sorts of fancy sidepanes
that merge.  Eclipse is a pretty good example of the latter.

I don't have a good handle on what kind of dock is appropriate for GTK+.
If someone wants to do a survey of existing docks and dock usage, that
could help us get this straightened out.

Personally, I'm coming to the opinion that a dock isn't needed for most
office-type applications.  They generally only have one toolbar and one
menubar, which is a cleaner interface.  Our users may thank us if we
don't provide a way for applications to overload on this.  Since IDEs
are pretty rare, and tend to have custom code anyway, this could be a
target for punting.

Thanks,
-Jonathan

[1] This has always seen to be of dubious utility.  Does anyone actually
ever use this??