[Ardour-Dev] GTK+ (concepts and advice)

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 16:32 +0000, John Emmas wrote:

> >
> Thanks.  That's the kind of advice I'm looking for.  What is 'Glade' BTW?  I
> thought about using it to design GUI interfaces but it seems to design them
> as XML resources which (I gather) get interpeted at runtime.  Is that
> useful?  And are there any examples where Ardour uses Glade?  I can see a
> library called libglademm but I don't know how or where it gets used.

Glade is a GUI designer (they used to be called RAD tools at one time).
You are correct that it spits out XML that is loaded at runtime and used
to construct the GUI "dynamically" (older versions emitted C code, but
thats been deprecated for a while).

We don't use Glade anywhere in ardour. My experience has been that Glade
works really well for simple apps and apps where user options do not
interact to create complex patterns of widget sensitivity. This is very
common in Ardour, and its actually easier to just cook up the dialog by
hand and get complete access to everything we need. 

> >
> > "Save As" is a *lot* more complicated than that, unfortunately.
> >
> To do it without re-loading the newly created session would be complicated
> (which is the main reason why I haven't done it) but the process itself
> isn't difficult (although it's very time consuming if native media is
> involved).

The problem is that you need to offer some rather complex options to the
user regarding copying the data associated with the session. Once the
user has made those choices, its easy, but presenting them in a
straightforward way is complicated, partly because there are really
smart (and really fast) ways to do the "copying" on a POSIX system that
do not exist on Windows.

--p