On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 19:43 +0200, Gyetvan Andras wrote:
> My wife and I are hobby photographers, so I have a lot of digital
> images. What I did not find in GNOME is a good Photo Album Manager,
> which can handle thousands of pictures and has an intuitive UI, good
> features
User Interface is a difficult topic. The base GUI code isn't that hard
to write, but developing something that has a discoverable interface can
be very demanding indeed.
The issue is complicated by the fact that what is a sound UI for one
person is completely unintuitive for another.
Most of all, however, is that there is a big difference between writing
something that supports your own workflow amazingly well, and trying to
write a generic program that attempts to satisfy everyone and pleases no
one in the process.
> I am using
> JAVA to implement "business logic" and Gtk+ for the UI. This is why I
> use java-gnome.
Yup.
> I found that there is a lot of "placeholder" classes in bindings where a
> lot of methods are missing. It is easy to add them and I already
> extended a few. So far I finished/extended the following classes :
Well. That sounds promising.
Since you expressed an interest in contributing, I can mention some of
the things you'll have to do if you want to get branches merged into
java-gnome.
By design, accessing the native libraries care of the generated
translation, native and JNI layers is very straight forward. As long as
you clearly understand the architecture behind things, you generally
don't need to worry about it. This allows us to focus on the important
part: the design of our public API and the documentation thereof.
The bottom line is that, like most projects, there is a very clearly
established style in place. This applies to cosmetic factors like coding
style, source formatting, documentation formatting and *especially*
documentation content.
In particular *DO NOT* cut and paste API documentation from the GTK or
Cairo or etc manuals. The GTK documentation is frequently ...
incomplete. It discusses things that do not apply to someone developing
in a memory managed language, and most of it is written in a reference
style, assuming that you more or less know what you're talking about.
And to quote Carl, "the API documentation for Cairo is not accurate".
The archives of last 3-5 years of mailing lists like gtk-list are
excellent sources of information, as people often drop behavioural
tidbits that everyone should be aware of - just the sort of thing that
should be in java-gnome's JavaDoc.
> Probably it is obvious that I touching classes in order as I need them
> in my project.
(That's good - I never understand people who want to contribute things
that they aren't actually using or know anything about)
> Finally, I have to tell that I have never ever joined to this kind of
> community, so I do not know the rules.
AfC
Sydney
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Andrew Frederick Cowie
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