It’s been a long time since I wrote about Sums, the small GTK application I began working on last year. In the period since, development has been progressing steadily and I’ve learned a lot about GTK and GObject.
I wish now I’d organised and recorded my experiences while developing the app and navigating the GTK/GLib/GObject documentation. My experience was positive; the GNOME documentation is generally fine, although I found myself reading the source code of other C GTK applications to get an understanding of a several development patterns.
The app has undergone a couple of facelifts and a port to GTK 4, as well as adding a host of new features and niceties. I recycled an old GNOME Calculator icon and I’ve tried to follow the GNOME HIG and latest design patterns wherever I can. I think it at least feels like a “real” app now, even if its feature set will likely always remain limited.
I’m happy to say I achieved my original goal of publishing it on Flathub. Try it out and tell me how many features it’s lacking!
The future
Time, interest and ability willing, there’s still a few things I’d like to work on. I’ve taught Sums to do as-you-type operator-to-notation substitution and I’d like to hook up an animation to this process, if it’s possible. Builder has a nice effect for autocompletion, but I don’t know how that’s accomplished. I’d also like to autohide or flatten the header bar to create an “all content” feel for the app, similar to Solanum.
Glade not recommended recommended
At the end of last year, Christopher Davis published a blog post titled “Glade
Not Recommended”.
Around that time, I was using Builder’s UI designer to work on Sums' UI, but I
wasn’t really satisfied. Even as a novice developer I was frustrated with the
way it chewed up my GtkBuilder files.
Davis' blog post gave me the confidence to commit to writing my UI files by hand. I’d recommend this to any new developer: it’s given me a much better understanding of how my application’s UI fits together.