Re: GTK+ brochure for FOSDEM

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 10:07:56 -0500
Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 9:40 AM, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>
> wrote:
>
> > To come back to GLib/GTK+, what would you explain about GTK+ that
> > is not explained in the brochure?  Maybe single-instance
> > applications, the recent OpenGL support, some of the important
> > widgets (but this latter thing, GNOME users already know what is
> > possible with GTK+ since they use daily GTK+ apps).
>
> GTK3's CSS styling feature is a huge draw for many developers. Being
> able to take an understanding of themeing based on web development
> and apply it to native applications is really a very very nice
> feature. I would have talked at greater length about that rather than
> GObject, since many developers using any language binding stand to
> benefit from CSS themeing, versus the few who might one day use a
> little bit of GObject.
>
> I would cite some of the more unique widgets in GTK also, especially
> the newer ones that might not be known by people familiar only with
> GTK1 and GTK2.

This may not be relevant to the brochure, but in my view apart from
CSS styling the greatest selling point for the GTK+-3 library family (as
opposed to GTK+-3 itself) is introspection for bindings.  By providing a
gobject-introspection binding for a language, you open up most of the
gnome stack to that language.  Sadly, there remain a number of
languages which don't provide this binding and which still separately
wrap glib and GTK+-2 (and occasionally GTK+-3); but nonetheless there
are decent bindings for python, lua and javascript.

Chris