Hi Peter, Peter Denno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Saturday 03 June 2006 08:21, Marco Gidde wrote: > >> What I miss most are much better drawing capabilities. Though I >> managed to draw a few lines on a widget using the mentioned functions >> I really did not get the ideas behind the API and switched to clg >> which already has cairo bindings. Of course clg has some other >> problems, e.g. no cells inside :-) and it is not using cffi. > > Do you mean you "did not get the ideas behind the API" of the drawing > functions, or cells-gtk in general? I meant the drawing functions. For instance it wasn't clear to me whether it was possible to draw directly on the widget or whether I had to create a pixmap which then should be copied to the widget. Also the meaning of the special variables (e.g. *window* and friends) and when (and why) they were set to some value wasn't clear. But as I wrote: I succeeded in drawing a line:-) But this is certainly not a serious critique since it is obvious that all the drawing stuff in cells-gtk is very raw and work in progress. > I think the biggest problem with cell-gtk is the lack of documentation of > Cells. And for me, some of the design choices of Cells are not intuitive, > making documenting it difficult. Not sure about the cells docu: though I only read the docu and most of the cells related discussions on c.l.l. but never used cells seriously before, it wasn't too hard to write a small test application, always keeping one eye on test-gtk. But the devil is in the details: e.g. when to use fm^ and when fm-other is still a miracle to me. > The drawing functions are a rough work-in-progress. The idea behind them > hasn't really been expressed yet (I had in mind something with closures, but > it needs lots of work). It was especially the amount of work that made me switch to clg. For the basic GUI stuff (eg. buttons, menus, list-views etc.) cells-gtk seems to be appropriate, maybe even better than cgl because of cells. > I took a quick look at clg and Cairo. Is what you like most about clg the > Cairo port? clg looks ok. Cairo looks like the interesting part of it. I am > not a "graphics person" but just someone who needed a GUI for lisp and > stumbled into cells-gtk. It is good that I saw Cairo now, before I got too > deep into drawing. I'll play around with it next time I get a chance to work > on Cells-gtk. It is not Cairo that attracts me, it's more clg's completeness and its nice integration with CLOS (in contrast to e.g. lambda-gtk, which is also quite complete, but using it is like programming in C with lots of parenthesis). While I have no problem with extending existing packages or fixing bugs as they occur, I don't want to spend most of my time doing this, in this case (GUI) especially because I never used GTK in C/C++ and so my knowledge is quite limited. If I had a choice, I would use Qt/KDE bindings, but these are essentially not existing and creating them seems to be really hard because of C++ and the C++ extensions used by Qt. If you think of continuing your work on the drawing functions, you should definitely take a very close look at Cairo: Gtk+-2.8 uses it internally for drawing the widgets! Regards, Marco _______________________________________________ cells-gtk-devel site list [email protected] http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/cells-gtk-devel
