GTK

Foundations of GTK+ Development is the first book completely dedicated to GTK+ development since 2001. It contains examples and instructions for using almost every single widget available in GTK+ 2.10. In addition, five appendixes provide a reference to often under-documented properties and signals.

Special care is taken to make chapters as independent of each other so that, once you learn the basics, you can skip around and learn the widgets that are most important to your current project. The companion web site for the book can be found at www.gtkbook.com.

There is a review of the Thunar file manager on the linuxondesktop blog. Thunar was created for use with XFCE but works fine with GNOME also. Could be an interesting alternative if Nautilus is not your flavour.

ArsTechnica has an article talking about PIDA. PIDA is a Gtk-based integrated development environment for Python programming with lovelable
features such as Vim embedding. Be sure to check out the article to learn a little more about Pida

Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone recently announced the LiMo Alliance which aims to provide its members with a shared Linux platform for mobile phones. Not many details are known yet, but one of the things mentioned in their Architecture Abstract is that this new mobile platform will be using GTK+ for its GUI. So along with Nokia's Maemo platform and the recently announced OpenMoko platform things are looking very good for GTK+ in the mobile space.

A lot of reviews online these days for the recently released Linux/GTK-based Nokia N800 internet tablet: C|Net's review, MobileCrunch's, Brighthand's, MobileBurn's, NYTimes', ToughtFix's and my own at OSNews. There is also an interesting usability/comparison study, the N800 vs the Apple Newton!

GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites.

GTK+ has been designed from the ground up to support a range of languages, not only C/C++. Using GTK+ from languages such as Perl and Python (especially in combination with the Glade GUI builder) provides an effective method of rapid application development.

GTK+ 2.9.0 is now available for download at:

ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtk+/2.9/

This is the first development release leading up to GTK+ 2.10.

Access subsidiary PalmSource revealed details of its Linux-based mobile phone operating system, Tuesday at 3GSM in Barcelona. Codenamed ALP (Access Linux Platform), the OS aims to provide an integrated, flexible software environment that can run legacy Palm OS application binaries, Java applications, and native Linux applications.

....content providers, operators, and third-party developers will be able to write native Linux multimedia applications, using included GStreamer and "optimized" GTK+ libraries....

Read the rest

The second part of IBM published series is up.

This article, the first in a three-part series, introduces you to the world of GTK+. It explains what GTK+ is, why you should consider using it, and the benefits it provides. Together with the rest of the series, this installment provides enough introductory information that, if you decide to use GTK+ in your own projects, you'll know where to look for further materials.

Read the rest

New embedded and portable windowing system, client/server interface between display hardware (mouse, keyboard, video displays) and the desktop environment that works on many hardware, including embedded devices (handhelds, set-top boxes, etc.) has been released by Xynth.
They say "The name Xynth comes from the coordinate system, which is the heart of the Xynth Windowing System design. Xynth is a LGPL licensed free software project. It aims to provide a lightweight GUI supported windowing system for Linux-based and/or real-time embedded systems." The project's range is embedded systems to desktops.

A new professional and very powerful 2D animation product has been open sourced after the company behind it failed to find enough customers. Synfig, which uses gtkmm (screenshot), has now been released completely under the GPL and it's still very actively maintained by its original author, Robert Quattlebaum.

The GIMP toolkit (GTK+) matures to include yet another platform. This
project aims to bring native GTK+ support to the Apple Mac OS X
platform. The basic implementation is sponsored by Imendio AB and the
work so far has been done by Anders Carlsson (of Imendio). This project
means that another critical step is taken in the effort to spread this
very successful library collection to all commonly used platforms. The
source code is now available in the upstream GTK+ CVS tree.

“In our aim to offer attractive solutions for software application
development, the crossplatform availability of GTK+ is a very important

tirpse (aka SchAmane) made an Clearlooks gtk-engine patch to get animated progressbar and checkboxes using cairo. Just download latest clearlooks gtk-engine CVS, patch and compile.
You can read more or see demo videos. I also wrote a little how-to. If you have a problem, let us know at #gnome-art@irc.gnome.org.

Updated:tirpse and Remenic have done a clearlooks cairo patch (last announcement) revision. Animations are part of Clearlooks gtk-engine now and are based on gtkrc settings. You can find these in latest clearlooks CVS excluding slider animation.
You can read more information here or just see progressbar animation demo (h264 241K). Have a fun :)

GnomeFiles.org (GTK+ software repository) is celebrating 1000 applications added to its database. Since GnomeFiles' launch 1.5 years ago the site grew enormously and it now serves more than 22,000 web pages per day on average and it includes a recently improved cHTML version for mobile browsers (mostly optimized for PDAs and smartphones, less-featured phones should be using its WAP version).