Re: gtk3/clutter UI

On Mon, February 11, 2013 10:45 pm, Jan Depner wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-02-11 at 00:09 +1100, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>> On Sun, February 10, 2013 7:19 pm, Jan Depner wrote:
>> > On Sun, 2013-02-10 at 15:23 +1100, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> I ran a few tests of the various options for getting clutter and gtk3
>> >> into
>> >> the gtk2 UI and the results were not very good. So I spent some time
>> now
>> >> (about 8 hours so far) migrating the existing code to gtk3 and adding
>> a
>> >> basic clutter stage.
>> >>
>> >> After a few hours of pain I have managed to get the interface to
>> build
>> >> and
>> >> run. Although I had to disable the hdeq, compressor graphs and meters
>> as
>> >> well as make a few guesses about the layout of the grid columns which
>> is
>> >> going to be a bit of a hassle to rebuild :-(
>> >>
>> >> The good news is that it had to be done at some point if we want to
>> keep
>> >> moving forward so it seems there is no time like the present.
>> >>
>> >> The question now is should I spin up a new tree for this version or
>> is
>> >> it
>> >> ok to go ahead and update the code to the existing repo. Given that
>> we
>> >> haven't been doing very much to jamin for the past few years I'm not
>> >> fussed if the old gui is completely replaced by a new shiny
>> gtk3/clutter
>> >> version.
>> >>
>> >> However this might be a good opportunity to move to svn too.
>> >>
>> >> FYI, the benefits of clutter are opengl support, touch interface
>> >> support,
>> >> UI animation support and that it frees us from the gtk h/vbox lock in
>> by
>> >> allowing us to place any size or shape widgets at any location on the
>> >> x/y/z axis.
>> >>
>> >> I have already been doing some work with it for the CMKeyboard
>> project
>> >> in
>> >> python. It's very powerful and a lot of fun too if you like UI dev
>> :-)
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >     If you're going to go through all that agony why not just rewrite
>> it
>> > using Qt?  Qt 4.8 is fine, I'm not so sure about 5.0.  In either case
>> > the documentation is about 100 times better than anything GTK.  I've
>> > personally ported about 30 applications from C/Motif/GTK/ANYGUI to C
>> > ++/Qt with no major problems.  And Qt is now under LGPL!
>> >
>>
>>
>> QT is under the control of Microsoft and I just don't trust that company
>> :-)
>
>
>     Qt is not under Microsoft's control.  It is now being developed by
> Digia but, since it is LGPL, it is not under anyone's control.  It can
> be forked anytime anyone wants to fork it.
>

Realistically who is going to do that when we have GTK?

Digia get a significant amount of funding from Microsoft and are therefore
beholden to their corporate agenda. The same happens to AMD among several
other companies. Over the years Microsoft has paid alot of people to
(attempt to) sabotage various projects that they could get their claws
into. This is well documented and not a surprise, theory or figment of my
imagination.

I choose not to support Microsoft or Microsoft partners so as I have a
choice between QT and GTK, I choose GTK. Everyone else is free do do what
they want and there is certainly no reason that JAMin cannot be ported to
c++ and QT by anyone who has the motivation to do so. Just not me :-)

Currently I have all the default widgets ported and displaying correctly.
I am going to port the fastmeter widget from ardour/guitarix to gtk3
tonight and then I will get stuck into the hdeq/spectrum/comp curves code.
Yesterday I disabled all the ui specific code in the hdeq.c/h and the
files are building successfully.

Probably will all be done by the end of the week if I don't get distracted.

The question is should I create a new repo/tree/branch or just update the
existing cvs with the new codebase? It a lot easier to update the existing
codebase but if anyone thinks they would like to continue developing the
gtk2 interface then we should keep it as a separate project.



>
>>
>> Plus I have a long term commitment to GTK and now Clutter too.  Clutter
>> development is partially funded by Intel and it is used for the new
>> Wayland desktop which is being rolled out to every distro over the
>> coming
>> year.
>>
>> It's 8 hours work so far. After it is done JAMin will once again be a
>> thoroughly modern interface showcasing the state of the art for
>> GTK3/Clutter and Linux Audio Apps.
>>
>>

--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd

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