Archive for August 12th, 2005

Posted on August 12, 2005 - by jono

OOo and Gazpacho

Great to see that some hacking on Gazpacho is going on. A few weeks back I was working to create some mock-ups of interface concepts for PiTiVi and a few other things. I tried both Glade and Gazpacho and I found both pretty difficult to use. They are certainly useful for creating dialog boxes, but seem rather unsuitable for full interface development. both tools are equally useless for configuring certain widgets that require further details. One glaring issue here was with the GTK tree widget. It looks like Jonathan Blandford pushed himself forward to fix this up though.

While looking into these tools, I did a bit of hunting around to see how much activity was going on with the projects. It seems that both Glade and Gazpacho were suffering from a pretty heinous lack of love and the mailing lists were getting few messages. Both projects seemed to be stalling. As we move forward it seems that Gazpacho may be leveraging itself as a possible replacement for Glade. Discussion of a better UI (using Yarrr! which is great) is all encouraging stuff. And…its written in Python.

On the OpenOffice.org front, it seems that there is good and bad news. On the good news side it seems that the Cairo work going into the suite is working well. This is going to be awesome for the drawing and presentations modules. The down side is that according to Michael Meeks, there were only 240,000 lines of code in the patches applied to OpenOffice.org, and the entire codebase spreads over 8 million lines. I honestly think the OpenOffice.org team need some help in encouraging more developers to come on board. I have a few ideas of how this could work from a community perspective, but my time is pretty limited at the moment. I might have a chat with Michael about this to see if we can flesh some ideas out.

Plenty of interesting discussion going on at PHPWM – glad to see the list is getting a bit more traffic. I get the impression it is becoming more and more useful.