Volition

So I finally have gotten off my ass and got my first few lines of GTK+ hacking done tonight. Nothing particularly impressive, I just had to get used to Glade's slightly clunky user interface to get one trivial patch accepted into the Gossip codebase. Then learnt the joy of the GTK+ object model, some GTKTreeView voodoo, and attempted to remember how to program in C to get another trivial patch for Gossip out. I hope this second one makes it into the v0.6 release, which is coming out real soon now; it's a nice usability plus.

If you use Jabber for IM and GNOME for your desktop, like I do, then check Gossip out. It's a nifty client that is coming along in leaps and bounds.

Still, I really don't know about GTK+'s object oriented programming model for C. It does work and it is fairly obvious what is going on in your code once you get used to it. But it is such blatant retrofit to the language and as purist git, I don't like it. Method calls read backwards comapred to what you would normally expect, which looks even more odd when you are dealing with structs at the same time, for example:

selection = gtk_tree_view_get_selection(GTK_TREE_VIEW(module->my_treeview));

It annoys me more that Python's incessant, enforced use of the this context instance object. It is truly sucktacular!

Still, this is old rant material. I'll stop complaining now and bask in the glow of having contributed some actual code back to the community. Sigh. :)