elementary would like to participate :)

[Daniel Foré <daniel elementaryos org>]

Hey folks,

Sri and Matthias pointed us here. Basically the idea is we want to start a discussion about how elementary can be more involved in Gtk+ development and Sri thought a good place to start would be to try getting some of our Granite widgets into Gtk+. I think I know someone who would be interested in porting widgets and getting them into upstream. I guess the big question is what you all find most interesting.

If you're not familiar with Granite, it's a Gtk+ based library that elementary uses in our apps. It contains some widgets and utils and things for stuff that we found ourselves rewriting over and over. It's written in Vala and you can view the source here: https://code.launchpad.net/~elementary-pantheon/granite/granite . It has a granite-demo that you can use to explore some of the widgets.

I know I had previously spoken to Matthias about the Tab Bar widget. That's quite a big one and I imagine that we'll have some design conflicts there, but it would be a really valuable one to have for sure.

Another one is maybe the Overlay Bar widget. This is a floating status bar widget like what you see in web browsers. I'm not sure if Epiphany implements something like this or not.

We recently landed an "Avatar" widget. That might be interesting. And then we have our "Welcome" and "AlertView" widgets which aren't terribly complex, but it saves developers having to know the specifics of how to implement these layouts.

Most of the stuff left in Granite these days is probably overly elementary-specific design wise and we've actually deprecated a good chunk of it due to recent advancements in Gtk+ (You guys rock!). But I'm definitely interested in seeing what might be useful to upstream.

Of course, you all know best where you need the most help. While I can't really dedicate an employee to hacking on Gtk+ (we only have two employees at the moment), I can probably commit to funding piece work (but of course, I have to consult the other owners to make sure that's okay).

I do think it would be really valuable for us to get more involved here. We owe a lot to Gtk+ and we'd love to help shape its future :)

 

Cheers,

Daniel Foré

elementary.io