[ghemical-devel] Re: about versions and organizing tasks

[Michael Banck]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 03:25:43PM +0300, Tommi Hassinen wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Tommi Hassinen wrote:
> >I'm focusing on HEAD version, and try to do tasks that help us longer 
> >term. Since VERSION_2_BRANCH and HEAD look the same from the user's 
> >perspective, we can later release HEAD as v2.10 or v2.20 when the time is 
> >right. Let's just solve the issues like Å/nm and configuration dialog so 
> >that the version jump would be as small as possible.
> 
> Just FYI, I'm still thinking whether VERSION_2_BRANCH and HEAD really 
> should look the same, or should I change some of the GTK gui-elements into 
> OpenGL-rendered ones (I mean the main menu and toolbar buttons). The 
> change would help porting the program to other platforms in future.

Oh, why that?  GTK+ is fairly portable in theory, and it provides a
common look 'n feel at least on GNU/Linux.

I think the current GUI could need some face-lifting to look more
GNOMEish, but I didn't have the time to look into this so far (and I'm
no GTK hacker (yet?)).

If you commit to a GTK GUI, maybe we could get help from some of the
GNOME artists (for our icons), UI and usability people.  

Otherwise, maybe reducing the GUI to a thin layer around the GL canvas
and motivating people to write e.g. native Cocoa and Windows GUIs would
make sense?

I'd hate ghemical to become a second pymol, its OpenGL GUI (along with
the external TKinter one) really makes it look ugly on a modern GNOME
desktop.


Just my two cents,

Michael