Gtk+ 3.0 Theming API Hackfest: Days 1 and 2

Greetings from the hackfest! Sorry for not sending something before, here are some notes.

Monday

Monday was mostly a discussion day, people presented their ideas and we started to try to reach a common vision to push to.

We also had Michael Ventnor from Mozilla Corporation and Jens Bache-Wiig, from Qt Software, Nokia (he says he’s the GNOME guy within Qt Software 😉 around to give us input from the third party integration point of view.

Jens did a really cool presentation and demo about QGtkStyle, a Qt Style backend that calls to the Gtk+ 2.x theming , really cool stuff, he had a GNOME environment running Qt/KDE apps that we actually had to stare at for a while to figure out if they were Qt apps or their Gtk+ counterpart. Really nice stuff (and really nice guy by the way). This Style is going to be part of the upcoming Qt 4.5 release.

Michael has been actually requesting feedback around how can Mozilla improve integration with Gtk+/GNOME, we talked about some

We did some agreements, first, we are going to move to a completely Cairo based API and CSS format/semantics for the theming and the element matching. Jens actually said that Qt might be interested working together with us to have similar or even a compatible CSS format for upcoming Qt releases so that themers can exchange up to some extend these themes between desktops. Cool stuff!!!

Tuesday

Yesterday was more of a hacking day, Carlos Garnacho started playing around with his new animation framework and GtkStyleContext prototype, an object that would be the responsible to pass all the information needed to the engines for them to draw widgets and its animation states. He actually got some stuff working, check the video:

Robert Staudinger has fixed some stuff in libcroco, the library that would allow us to parse CSS files in the future.

Hagen Shink and myself were working on adding shaped widgets support, so that engines can return a GtkBitmap with a mask that is then used to know where widgets are responding to events or not. This way we could have a rounded button that won’t be clicked if we click on the corners outside of the shape.

Benjamin has been helping the Qt and the Mozilla guys to help to improve performance with the Qt/Mozilla integration. Nice stuff!

I will add some more notes tomorrow or friday. Stay tuned!