Bye bye Gnome/GTK

Over the past few months, I've been becoming increasingly incensed by Gnome and GTK: Gnome 3 for their style-over-substance antics which IMO are unusable for any serious (efficient and over sustained periods) work, and GTK for being a crappy-tastic crumbling dinosaur of a toolkit that breeds mediocrity.

PyGTK - DrawingArea, Notebook Tabs, and Deadlocks

Despite my previous rant on GTK, I still need to finish up some work with this toolkit. For example, today we'll briefly discuss yet another example of the bugginess of this toolkit: random deadlocks and "crash by assertions".

Gtk Rant

I've thoroughly had it with Gtk and PyGtk.

Before starting work on a project that was using and needed to be delivered in PyGtk, I was still under the illusion that perhaps Gtk (and its Python port) may still yet be the best of the toolkits out there, just that I'd never really dealt with it for anything before. But now that I have used it extensively, I have to conclude that this is not the case.

PyGtk Tip - Spin Buttons and Misbehaving Arrows

Just a quick tip for something that I finally found the answer to after searching fruitlessly for for a while.

If for whatever reason the arrow buttons aren't behaving - as in, they won't do anything when you click on them normally, but will start zooming off increasingly fast when click+holding them - then you need to set "step_increment" on its "adjustment" object (a value of 1.0 for this serves most purposes well).

For all the failings (IMO) of Gtk, at least the "adjustment" object design is an example of one thing that they did right over other toolkits. I like this, since I've found that it makes it ridiculously easy to simply hook up all the various widgets that may be displaying a numerical value so that they update correctly when the others change, all without the need to write many tedious flushing event callbacks.

PyGTK - Collapsible Panels

Mwahahaha... last night I finally managed to coerce PyGTK into giving me collapsible panels that looked the way I wanted.

PyGTK Documentation Rant

So, continuing on my series about PyGTK, today I'm going to be discussing one of those issues which every new users of some tool or toolset comes across (hopefully, if it even exists): documentation.

Fortunately, in this case, they DO have some documentation. Heck, they've got some tutorials and a reference manual. On the surface it's all well and good, until you start running into a few things which start to become gradually more annoying as time goes by.

GTK Quick Tip - Toggling icons on toolbars

Just a quick tip when using GTK to try and set up a toggle button, with an icon that changes appearance when the state changes.

When initialising the images for use on the button, remember to do ".show()" on BOTH of the icons, otherwise, only the one visible on the button on startup will be visible later on.

Disclaimer:  I'm still getting my head around GTK (PyGTK), so the following code snippet may not be considered "best practice" in these cricles.