Widget Layout, status and gtk3
Over the last 12 months we have been converting our 'classic' dialogs away from fixed size and position widgets to dynamic widget-layout enabled dialogs. Here we outline progress to date, work remaining to be done and thoughts on using native gtk3 widgets under GNOME3
Details of the Talk
Dialogs in LibreOffice were traditionally horrifically ugly, mostly because all widgets contained within them and the dialogs themselves were typically fixed size and sized to contain the text of the longest translation. The other reason they were ugly is because they were so painful to edit.
At LiboCon 2012 we demonstrated a prototype implementation of a gtk-alike widget layout in LibreOffice's vcl toolkit using our own vcl widgets and reusing the gtk builder file format, allowing us to use the ui editor glade to create new LibreOffice dialogs.
Over the last 12 months we have been converting the old UI to the new format, this talk provides:
a) a status update of the state of the conversion
b) common problems and patterns to solve them
c) thoughts on using native gtk3 widgets instead of gtk-themed vcl widgets when running under GNOME3