Gustavo Noronha (kov)

One of my awesome colleagues from Collabora, Danielle Madeley, has done various improvements to the clutter-gtk project started by the also awesome Alexander Larsson. Reading her blog I was so impressed with this post, that I decided to spend some free time to try out some crazy, experimental stuff using that.

What I did was create a very simple GTK+ widget that derives from GtkClutterEmbed, and works as a somewhat replacement for GtkNotebook, called, proving how bad I am at naming things, GkOverview. Like I said, it’s not really stable or well-done, it doesn’t even free its resources (in fact, it doesn’t even have implementations for finalize and dispose!), it’s really just an experiment.

What GkOverview does is provide a simple API for you to append widgets into it, and it is able to show you one of those widgets, or an overview of all of them. This is quite simple, and yet very powerful. With the help of my significant other, I have got a layout of the widgets in the overview that I really like.

Of course I used WebKitGTK+ to try it out, what else? And since I had effectivelly, at least in my head, created a fairly convincible replacement for GtkNotebook functionality, I decided a second challenge I could take on myself was to make my preferred browser, Epiphany, use that instead of its EphyNotebook widget. Epiphany being quite well-designed, replacing EphyNotebook was quite a breeze, and here’s the result!

Before I go on, let me repeat it: this is all crappy, experimental, curiosity-induced work. It may be that in the future we can use stuff like this to make, say, improving the back/forward mechanism, history navigation, as other browsers do, replacing tabs with a better UI mechanism, and whatnot.

There’s a somewhat big “video”, for your pleasure (I was finally able to create a nice video, using Byzanz =)).

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 8:49 pm and is filed under English, Epiphany, webkit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.