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More progress made!

The WIP icon manager app now renders SVG icons as vector drawings, so they don't get pixellated and appear extra crisp on HiDPi displays.

The search bar is also now visible in the header bar for quick access. It now filters the icons in the currently selected list.

#GNOME #AppDev #GTK

#gnome #gtk #appdev
in reply to Chris Wood

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •

For every day that I've sat down to work on this app, I've managed to solve a problem that seemed insurmountable the day before.

The app now copies icons to your clipboard, ready to paste into design software! It can paste icons both as SVG data (which Inkscape supports) and as a temporary file (which Figma and file managers support).

It also loads icon sets that are bundled with the app and has an overview of all the sets installed.

#GNOME #GTK #AppDev

#gnome #gtk #appdev
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Chris Wood

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •

Having trouble with a GtkGridList. Looking for help.

I've replaced a GtkFlowBox with a GtkGridList to improve performance. However, the GridList is breaking the layout.

The height of every child of the GridList expands to beyond the edges of the window (screenshot 1), unless it’s the *direct descendent* of a GtkScrolledWindow (screenshot 2). In the second case, the grid renders as expected but I can't put the header in.

Does anyone know a way around this? (Code below)

#GNOME #GTK #AppDev

Grid where the children are taller than the window's height
Grid that displays correctly but has no header
#gnome #gtk #appdev
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Chris Wood

Angelo Verlain
Angelo Verlain
• •

GtkGridView and GtkListView are designed to be put into GtkScrolledView, or otherwise you won't get the performance benefits at all.

I was working on a custom widget that would enable showing a GtkScrollable (in this case a GtkGridView) with a header and keeping the perf benefits. I can show you the code and you can try to port it to swift.

You can also try setting vexpand/valign in the meantime

in reply to Angelo Verlain

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •

@vixalientoots thank you, this is what I suspected. I’ll work with this limitation then 😊

Yes that sounds great, I’d be happy to take a look at your custom widget and see if I can rebuild it in JS!

Thanks for your help!

@Angelo Verlain
in reply to Chris Wood

Sonny
Sonny
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hey, your app looks really cool. Do you happen to use Workbench for learning or prototyping ? If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts and how it went.
in reply to Sonny

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •
@sonny Yes, absolutely. The official documentation feels impenetrable for a newcomer and assumes the user already has a lot of knowledge. I've found it much easier to understand how to build apps in GTK by seeing all the examples there, copying and pasting them into my own project, and tweaking them.
@Sonny
in reply to Chris Wood

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •
@sonny The concept of some widgets only accepting 1 child was mind-boggling, as someone coming from a web development background. I didn't see this clearly explained anywhere, nor any explanation of why some components have their child as a <property> or as a <child>. I sort of had to work this out by looking through the examples in Workbench. This was by far the biggest barrier; if I hadn't worked that out I would've given up early.
@Sonny
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Chris Wood

Sonny
Sonny
• •

thanks! Glad to hear Workbench is fulfilling its goals.

I agree with you, and I'm confident we'll make things even better by improving diagnostics and adding a linter

github.com/workbenchdev/Workbe…

Please don't hesitate to file an issue or reach out if you see notice anything that would confuse a beginner.


Add hints / guards against silent or unclear failures · Issue #218 · workbenchdev/Workbench

Some things fail (or crash even) silently—we should add measures to inform users and possibly prevent the rendering. https://floss.social/@sonny/109975391706946091 I discussed with James if this be...
GitHub
in reply to Sonny

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •
Perfect, I'll keep that in mind!
Yes, it really is useful. I'm a UX Designer and I haven't build a web app in 7 years, so for all intents and purposes I shouldn't be able to build an app. But being able to start with ready-made layouts in Workbench and write in a language I'm fairly familiar with (JS) has made this possible. So, really, really incredible work - thank you for putting it together
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Chris Wood

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •
@sonny Workbench was the best resource for getting started. I love how you've got the different language bindings in there; that's really helpful.
It can be a bit tedious closing windows. It keeps asking me to save changes when all I did was click on a button in the preview panel. And I'd love it if it remembered my choice of UI templating language; at the moment, I manually change it to "XML" every time I open a new preview.
But overall, it's totally invaluable. It's a wonderful learning tool
@Sonny
in reply to Chris Wood

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •
@sonny I think I would've found it helpful to see a few more examples of navigation views and header bars. That was the first thing I built, and it took me a long time to work out how to put a widget in the middle of a header bar. I kept poring through the GTK documentation on GtkHeaderBar, trying <child type="center">, before realising the proper syntax was an AdwHeaderBar and the property <property type="title-widget">
Other than that, it's been really complete and fleshed out!
@Sonny
in reply to Chris Wood

Sonny
Sonny
• •

+1

Workbench current Library UX doesn't scale very well for variations of widgets / APIs.

I've been toying with interactive tutorials for GNOME where we could explain widgets and concepts at length.

Like a book with interactive / inline code examples to demonstrate and play with each option.

It's not a great example but it gives an idea of what the framework could do:

floss.social/@sonny/1090132957…


Sonny (@sonny@floss.social)

Attached: 1 image Just an idea/experiment so far, but I'm tinkering with: #GTK renderer for Markdown and "Learn development with #GNOME" app / interactive tutorial Anyone interested in the renderer? What would you do with it?
FLOSS.social
in reply to Sonny

Chris Wood
Chris Wood
• •
@sonny More examples with code in a beginner-friendly format sounds great. I would be concerned about adding one more source that people need to reference though.
So far, I've used
- The "GJS book" tutorial, to get started
- The "gjs.guide" website, as a reference for GJS concepts (e.g. how to work with properties, property bindings and signals)
- The GTK docs, for reference on individual class properties / methods / signals
- The GNOME GJS docs, when I realised these were more accurate for JS
@Sonny
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