#4 standard gtk about dialog

[Alan Horkan]

Before making a request I wanted to try myself to make
Comix use the standard GtkAbout dialog. The idea works
and I was able to get it running as you will see from
my patch. You can probably also see I haven't had as
much pratice with Python as I might like (took me most
of the afternoon).
The patch isn't very good and you may well want to
rewrite it completely but it does work and when done
properly it will require significantly less code than
creating your own About dialog. Not needing to
manually markup strings is always good.
The strings I have used are really only short
placeholders and you will probably want to change them.
I'm not sure how or why but the Comix icon was picked
up automatically and added to the dialog without my
needing to do anything. I think maybe it is just
reusing the standard Window icon (if i understand the
pygtk documentation correctly). I couldn't quite get
the authors strings to work and it is being presented
as vertical text (see Credits).
Beyond those fundamental fixes you might want to see
about making the website link clickable.

Comix already depends on PyGtk 2.8 and the GtkAbout
dialog has been included since Gtk 2.6 so dependencies
should not be a problem.
(Another benefit is that if comix is ever ported to a
small screen portable device - I'm sure someone will
sooner or later - they should already have a standard
implementation of the About dialog for their platform
which will take all the information and present it in a
way that fits comfortably onscreen. One less thing to
worry about.)

[Alan Horkan]

rough patch to make Comix use standard gtk about dialog

[Pontus Ekberg]

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Hi Alan,

thanks for your patch and your effort. I have actually
cleaned up the about dialog code a bit for version 3.5, so
it isn't quite as messy as the one in 3.4, but it might
still be good to migrate to the standard dialog. I didn't
know it behaved differently on different platforms, that can
be practical. I am trying to get 3.5 out as soon as possible
(it's really overdue already), but I'll see what can be done
for 3.6.

[Alan Horkan]

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> I didn't know it behaved differently on different platforms

In most cases it wont behave differently but on platforms
but it easily could.
platforms such as GPE have their own implementation to make
sure it fits onscreen. similarly other platforms could
write their own file chooser so long as it followed the
standard API but despite all the complaints practically no
one except GPE has done so as far as I know.
(I'm not counting nokia770/maemo, it is sort of an extension
of GPE. I'm surprised XCFE hasn't done it though but I
never got around to suggesting it to them.)

I look forward to seeing 3.5, you seem to do a very good job
of releasing early and often.
I certainly dont mind if this code has to wait since the
about dialog is not important for day to day use, but since
it was relatively unimportant it was a good place to
practice python.

Thanks.

[Pontus Ekberg]

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I tried the AboutDialog, but it wouldn't let me display
proper credits, like you discovered yourself. There is a
method for adding translators, but it will only display the
translator for the current language, and I would like to
have them all displayed independent of the language used
(they deserve all the credit they can get). Also I would
like to be able to credit specific parts to people, like the
thumbnailer to Christoph Wolk, but that is not possible
either. Until I solve these issues I will stick to the old
about dialog.

The main disadvantage in using the custom dialog is that the
links are not clickable, but even with AboutDialog you must
specify a custom hook function for it, and I don't think you
can get the default browser/email client without using GNOME
libs anyway.

I guess the GPE people will have to live with it for a
while, hopefully it will still be usable on their palms.

[Alan Horkan]

Please consider this request closed.

Thanks all the time and effort you put into Comix.

I have moved on to MComix which continues the work
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcomix/