Re: Initial commit of abicandy.py

[sorry for the late reply]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:

> Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 01:20:31 +1100 (EST)
> From: msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Initial commit of abicandy.py
>
>
> Hi everyone,
> I've just made an initial commit of abicandy.py. It's located in
>
> pyabiword/abicandy/abicandy.py
>
> To run it, just type abicandy.py after build the bindings.
>
> This simple application wraps the abiwidget provided by the python
> bindings to give something like the mockup requested by the OLPC group.
> There are many things that need fixing.

> 1. It use gtk_stock icons - we need a fancy way to replace them with the
> nice, big tango icons used in the last set of rpms

There should not be any "fancy way", OLPC should have their own default
theme which plays friendly and uses the existing themes infrastructure.
Anything else would be broken and it countermands their own goals of
making easily maintainable software if the same software cannot easily be
run on ordinary Gnome systems.

That isn't to say they've made a mistake, they wouldn't be the first
developers to forget to use themes to change the look of their
applications, and I highly doubt they will be the last. (For example see
any Gtk applications which uses a row of buttons because they don't like
the standard flat look of toolbars and want them to look like buttons so
they use widgets inappropriately instead of creating a theme.)

I like glade, it places more design focus on the user interface rather
than on the code itself. It seems a shame you had to cut it out of
abicandy especially since OLPC might actually want to embrace that kind of
interactive graphical development rather than sticking exclusively to
writing widget code in something as specific as Gtk Python. Perhaps this
is something which can be revisited in future.

Congratulations on all the AbiWidget work. Perhaps this will see a
resurgance of interest in using abiword as a plugin in programs like
Mozilla, Evolution, and others. Integration like that might be the
incentive distributions need to reinclude abiword (or the guts of abiword)
by default. That doesn't even mention all the good karma abiword will get
from OLPC.

Give yourselves a big pat on the back.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/
Received on Fri Dec 1 23:33:07 2006