Re: RFC: new features

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On Wed, 2012-01-11 at 20:38 -0800, Christian Hergert wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-01-12 at 03:59 +0100, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> 
> > PLOTS
> > This is my personal pet peeve. I often have something I'd like to
> > quickly plot in GTK, but it always ends up being more complicated then
> > I thought, so I either stare at text or use Gnumeric to get my plots.
> > And all the other applications (like virt-manager or
> > gnome-system-monitor) that do plotting look rather crappy and their
> > plots don't provide a lot of features (no zooms, no tooltips with
> > actual values, no ability to expand or collapse certain parts).
> > However, is a plotting widget a useful addition to GTK? If it works
> > well, it would surely enable people to show lots of useful statistics
> > that we'd all be thankful for - collecting them is not hard after all,
> > but making their output useful is. I'm sure a lot of people would like
> > bandwidth graphs in NetworkManager, page load performance graphs in
> > Epiphany or an interactive bootchart. Even if it's "just" the
> > developers using it to improve the rest of the world.
> > That said, such a widget would need a simple interface - both in API
> > and UI, and I'm not seeing anybody working on that. But I'd be very
> > interested.
> 
> The part I found frustrating while working on scrolling[1] graphs was
> coming up with a good model for storing data points. Especially when you
> consider being able to graph different scales or modes of graphs. Say
> heatmap, 2d plot, 3d plot, etc. Linear or logarithmic scales, etc. And
> then also abstracting the look of the plot and the renderers.

Another +1 for plots, in particular a scrolling plot widget. 

I maintain a bit of scientific software for University and they all use
real-time scrolling line charts. The basic requirements are
 * good performance (Christians was the best performing of those I
tried)
 * multiple traces
 * autoscale
 * independently (of incoming data) adjustable scrolling speed
 * introspectable / usable from python[1]

> MENU BUTTON
> A GtkButton that shows a menu when clicked (and handles positioning,
> etc). Some would just use a combobox, but I find them pretty different.
> You'll find this sort of "menu button" in various VMware products on
> Linux. (I know the fullscreen toolbar used to have it at least).

And this too (if you are describing the wrench menu on chrome for
example).

John

[1] Access from python because they get used in association with numpy,
which is used for the static plots. In the end I chose to maintain a
fork of the old rtgraph pygtk package https://github.com/nzjrs/rtgraph