Re: [Denemo-devel] Building Denemo with --enable-gtk2

[Richard Shann]

On Fri, 2015-11-27 at 13:40 -0300, John Coppens wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2015 10:33:55 +0000
> Richard Shann <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > The problem that will arise is that I don't have a mobile device (words
> > like Android have quite a different meaning to me) and so can't help see
> > the way forward here. I do see that the Gtk team are adapting the API to
> > target those devices and causing problems for the older ones.
> 
> Richard,
> 
> As the main problem with Gtk3 seems to be tooltips, why not change the system?

that was just this crisis, the number of deprecation warnings coming out
when I compile with this newer version of Gtk is quite alarming. Even
the humble GtkBox which virtually everything in Denemo uses is being
deprecated. I notice that all of the menu labels on the toolbars
suddenly have a chunk of space around them, forcing the windows wider,
while people are already complaining that they can't shrink them in
width to fit the Display and Print windows on their small screens.

> Maybe a more practical solution is to use the 'hover' event or
> 'enter'/'leave' event of widgets to create a proper tooltip system?
> Maybe reserve one or two lines at the bottom of the screen, and make
> help texts appear there, instead of having them pop up annoyingly
> everywhere?

that's quite popular I think, though I rarely notice things changing
there. So what I have done is to put messages in a large and colored
typeface so that the window geometry changes and draws attention to the
message. Still, re-working the system to use that is painful work, done
at the expense of useful things that Denemo lacks. 

Richard