On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Christian Hergert <ch...@dronelabs.com> 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. > > Below is a list of things that come to mind. I'm kind of forcing it, not > particularly attached to the list below. I'm just trying to provide some > diversity. > > VALIDATION > Many developers in the web world have become accustom to "validating" > the contents of forms before submitting them. While we would often argue > against allowing invalid input in the first place, that can often > confuse users. In this case, allowing the input and providing an > accurate reason why the input is invalid yields better results. I'm not > sure what a good API here would look like, but it needs to be flexible > enough to work with built-in and custom widgets. > > DOCKABLE PANELS > There is an in-between that might be reachable instead of a full docking > library. The idea is more of "panels". It's like float-able tool palette > that can be joined together. GIMP has this, and it's pretty bad. Which > could be an argument against it. But you can see a good implementation > in OmniGraffle[2] for OS X. > > 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). > > WIDGET STACK > Like a notebook with no tabs or decoration. You "push" and "pop" widgets > on and off the stack. This is the navigational structure often found on > iOS. The reason I think abstracting it might make sense is more about > animating between widgets once Gtk starts landing animation (post > clutter integration obviously). It would be great if this nicely > integrated with a "navigation bar" type widget. Here[3] is a video of > some crappy animation code I wrote to do this. > > ENTRY COMPLETION > We already have entry completion, but it would be much more useful if it > let you see the list of possible completions.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think this can be done now, if not it's really not so far off the mark. Generally you would create a gtk_combo_box_new_with_entry() and add a GtkEntryCompletion to it. We might be missing the part that, the dropdown menu should be positioned completely *below* the combo box and the items should be filtered while the user types, but I haven't tried it recently, it wouldn't surprise me if we already support this feature. > > Cheers, > > [1] http://audidude.com/?p=470 > [2] > http://westergaard.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/OmniGraffle-Professional-001.png > [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp6ceGP-6vU > > > _______________________________________________ > gtk-devel-list mailing list > gtk-devel-list@gnome.org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
