Around the Planet

No, this are senility mockups, look at:
http://web.subpop.net/text/gnome/IM.html

I guess you mean the 'Rotated' text string. I guess this is in Italic so it should be slightly slanted anyhow. 'Hello world' and 'me' look fine.

Uhm.. no, they look terrible. For example, look at the two L:s in "Hello".

Can't wait until this is implemented in Gnumeric charts! :)

You got that right! =)

Strange no one have thought of this before!

You mean, of course, "Too bad nobody (like me) took the time to implement it."

All apps can have a "standard set of /../ file interaction functions", it's called gnome-vfs. By linking to that, you get instant access to everything gnome-vfs can handle by using the methods provided by it.

There is no need to integrate that in GTK+, since you can *choose* if you want it or not by linking to gnome-vfs. Not all apps handles files so forcing everything into GTK wouldn't be a good idea IMHO.

Also, gnome-vfs needs a daemon running for file monitoring and stuff, this isn't something that all GTK+-apps want or need.

Gnome is a platform and at least all the standard apps in the platform should be Gnome apps. Making gnome-vfs a systemwide requirement is a good idea.

Then why doesn't every single gnome app support it? Like I said, I'm not a gnome developer. All I know is that an aweful lot of apps don't do this and that seems strange.

Gnome-VFS isn't particularly harder than standard POSIX file accessing. In many somewhat more advanced ways, it's even easier (think device monitoring, mounting, ...).

However, in programming classes, you will always learn POSIX file accessing, so monkey-see-monkey-do, you use that in your first try as well. Later on, you'll port it to Gnome-VFS. It's not hard, it just needs doing, that's all.

Gnome-VFS really is a piece of art. It definately has bugs and it's somewhat awkward in some ways, but that's all fixeable. I like the general way in which it works.

That is lame. Not pointing any fingers, it just sucks. Don't gnome apps get file handles from the file open dialog? Developers don't do a fopen themselves do they? So I still don't see why people are not all using gnome-vfs by default. Even gtk apps should be *trying* to use gnome-vfs and only falling back to normal file operations if gnome-vfs can't be found.

Like I said, again, I'm not a gnome developer so I could be totally off but I'm imagining a file open situation like:

file_handle = gnome_file_open_dialog(blah blah blah);

Right? So why doesn't this "just work"? I'm seriously curious.

The filechooser only gives you a filename. This is good, since you may not want to open the file (hence the name filechooser and not fileopener ;-))

But I agree that all apps that is targetting GNOME should try to use gnome-vfs for file access. However, there are some things that must be considered when using gnome-vfs. For instance, most applications just fopen("filename") and expect a filedescriptor within a couple of milliseconds. On the other hand, if you're working with remote files, every access to the file may take seconds (even minutes if the server is unavailable). This must be taken into consideration if you don't want long lock-ups in the GUI.

Another point is that not all things are possible on remote files. For instance, you can't seek in some filetypes (meaning that you can't tell it to open file X at position Y and start reading/writing there). This is not a show-stopper, but it's a thing that a developer needs to think of.

This (and perhaps some more things i can't come up with) is why it doesn't "just work"...

These are like the Gnome Summaries of olde, but make a lot more sense in this day and age of the blog.

Thanks for taking the time to cull through all the entries and giving us lazy folk the creme of the week.

I would like to say thank you for them as well.

Yes yes yes! Please do! =)

Planet Gnome is one of the coolest places on the web if you're into this sort of thing, but it can be a little overwhelming at times. After a long day at school I can sometimes come home to 25+ postings! Weekly summaries are definitely appreciated.

Yes. I appreciate the weekly summaries to.