[gtkada] survey: what applications do you develop ?

[briot at gnat.com]

Preben Randhol writes:
 > At the moment I'm working on a small and simple tetris game to learn more
 > about Ada95, Gdk and Tasks.

Sounds interesting (more than the simple double_buffer example in the GtkAda
distribution :-). Have you tried to look at that widget ? Some users have
reported problems with it when the window is resized, but I am pretty sure it
could be fixed (I don't know much about tasking myself).

 > Though I'm waiting for Gtk 1.4 with unicode support for this.

We had a full presentation of the future features of gtk+1.4 (or maybe 2.0,
the authors are not sure yet) at the first GNOME conference in Paris last
week.
Unicode support seems to be almost fully functional already, we had a demo
that mixed a lot of asian, european and indian writings in a single window.
It supports text in both direction (left to right and right to left),...
There are of course a lot of other new features scheduled, including a really
improved support for anti-flickering (while resizing windows for instance),
done transparently by gtk+.

 > If I should make a wish it would be to be able to load and render
 > pictures (pixbuf ?), a canvas widget like gnomecanvas and
 > XML validation.

Yes, Gdk.Pixbuf, in coordination with the existing fast Gdk.Rgb widget (for
those interested in image manipulation, the latter is much faster than using
server-size Gdk.Pixmaps), is a full API to load, manipulate and render images,
including anti-aliasing,...
The upcoming GNOME 2.0 will be based on that library rather than on the
current one, which has been considered too slow.