Gtk2Hs

Gtk2Hs version 0.9.11 is now available from:

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/download/

The source tarball and an installer for Windows are available. Packages are available for Gentoo and FreeBSD. Packages for various other platforms should become available soon (hopefully including Fedora, Debian and Darwin).

Changes since 0.9.10:

• works with GHC 6.6 and Gtk+ 2.10.x
• new typed tree/list widget API
• new OpenGL widget added
• new cairo SVG package (for rendering SVG images on cairo surfaces)
• new implementation of the Graphics.SOE API
• new glade tutorial
• many more demo programs (clock, graph, traffic congestion sim, fonts, noughts & crosses, opengl, svg and updated profile viewer and other tree/list demos)
• much smaller binaries (thanks to the ghc ’split objs’ feature)
• many bugs fixed
• new functions for working with the threaded RTS
• various minor documentation improvements

A release candidate for Gtk2Hs 0.9.11 is now available. (The actual version number is 0.9.10.6)

The source tarball and Windows installer are available:

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.10.6.tar.gz
(md5sum 8842898cb1f6b595b5a3a057e66a810b)

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.10.6.exe
(md5sum 97ed838d88ee2d6a01e78d3fea26c18c)

and the corresponding documentation:
http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/docs/gtk2hs-docs-0.9.10.6/

Changes since 0.9.10:

• works with GHC-6.6 and Gtk+ 2.10.x
• new tree/list widget api
• new OpenGL widget added
• new cairo SVG package (for rendering SVG images on cairo surfaces)
• new implementation of the Graphics.SOE api
• new glade tutorial (and hopefully the new intro tutorial will be ready in time for the final release)
• many more demo programs (clock, graph, traffic congestion sim, fonts, noughts & crosses, opengl, svg and updated profile viewer and other tree/list demos)
• much smaller binaries (thanks to the ghc ’split objs’ feature)
• many bugs fixed
• various minor documentation improvements

Changes since the first release candidate:

• now works again in GHCi (even in Windows!)
• new functions for working with the threaded RTS
• new ./configure –enable-profiling flag
• new ./configure –with-user-pkgconf flag
• Windows version now uses the “MS Windows” theme by default
• Windows version now comes with the Gtk+ OpenGL package
• Windows version now supports GHCi (6.6 only) and profiling
• minor fixes to various demo programs
• the svgcairo package now uses librsvg rather than libsvg-cairo

Please test this on your platform and report success or failures to the gtk2hs users list. So far we’ve tested on Linux (x86, x86-64, sparc), Windows and Solaris (sparc) with GHC 6.2.2, 6.4.1, 6.4.2, 6.6 and with Gtk+ 2.0 and 2.10. Build reports from people using *BSD, Mac OS X (ppc or x86), GHC 6.2.2 or Gtk+ 2.4-2.8 would be particularly appreciated.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dear fellow users,

We’re working on a new release of Gtk2Hs which is certainly overdue, not least due to the release of GHC 6.6. We have re-implemented the clumsy Tree- and ListStore objects in Haskell. These objects store the data of the TreeView, ComboBox, IconView and some other widgets which were previously as difficult to use as in C, i.e. setting up a List- or TreeStore and connecting it to the widgets was a nightmare. Duncan has bitten the bullet and re-implemented the ListStore and all it’s ugly interfacing to Gtk within Haskell, on top of which I’ve written a corresponding TreeStore implementation in Haskell. What gives us a bit of a headache is that the not-so-standard widgets like ComboBox often internally create the C variants and that there seem to be no hooks to drop in our own Haskell replacement. As a result, our Haskell List- and TreeStore is not quite working with all widgets.

Duncan therefore proposed to include both, the C-land List- and TreeStore and our new Haskell List- and TreeStore in the new release. While this seemed to be a good intermediate solution, one of our brave bleeding edge users (who use the darcs repository rather than the last release) rightfully complained that things do not work with the new Haskell models. He’s hardly to blame, as it is far from clear which functions are from the C model and which are from the Haskell model. Mixing them will give a compilable program, but one which complains at runtime about bad iterators, invalid indices and the like. I’m wondering wether we should release just the new model and try to fix as many widgets as possible, even if that means that not all widgets will be fully usable in the next release. Note that we really would like to release before Christmas!

The Nottingham FP group invited the two core Gtk2Hs developers (Axel and myself) to come and talk as part of their informal lunchtime seminar series “FP Lunch“. The slides of our presentation are now online along with links to most of the demos we showed off.

We spent much of the afternoon talking to the Epigram group. They are interested in using Gtk2Hs for a new graphical editor for Epigram 2. They want to build a WYSIWYG structure editor with LaTeX-quality on-screen rendering. This is an ambitious goal but not an unrealistic one we feel. We talked about the use of Pango and cairo for text rendering and played with some algorithms for laying out formulae on screen. Code and screenshots of that below. This is an exciting project and one we are keen to see come to fruition.
Read the rest of this entry »