which_chick | (no subject)

So today in the world of computers, I read about widgets. Widgets are a major feature of the GTK (Gnome ToolKit -- Gnome is the windows manager thingie on my computer.) -- they're a fairly sizeable part of making a pretty GUI front end for programs that run on Gnome. Why would I want to know about this? Well, mostly because I can.

I fear that the level of geek here is going to be insufficiently-geeky for the geek friends and way too geeky for the non-geek friends and for that I am sorry. I don't write code, particularly. I dabble. The occasional shell script, maybe. I can quit anytime I want.

Anyway, in my widget progress, I went and got all the parts I'd need to make widgets. There's a bunch of crap I needed, but I already had the gcc and a bunch of the libraries from doing other stuff. I got the rest of the crap I needed today. (Interestingly, as you go further away from "normal people computer activities", the documentation gets less and less hand-hold-y. Personally, I think this is hysterical when I'm not swearing about the lack of documentation and hand-holding. I'm pretty bipolar about the whole thing.)

I located a tutorial for learning-to-build-widgets, online, natch. I read the tutorial. I am now doing the try-along examples. (This would have taken longer if I'd never seen a compiler before and had never tried to read C to see what it did but I have had enough experience that neither of those is true.) I realize that there are GUI things that let you point-n-click to build your widgets, but I figured I had better learn the real way first. After all, there are GUI things that purport to generate acceptable html, too... and I've seen the code that FrontPage generated.

In the tutorial, I'm at the part where I can make a box appear on the screen. The box has three buttons. If you press Button 1, it says (in the terminal window) "Button 1 was pressed." (Why does it say that in the terminal window? Dumb-ass place for a message, really. Who the fuck is looking in the terminal window anyway? Can I make it say that on a new, pop-up box with a "Close" button on it? How would I do that? Could I *make* it wait for that window to close before the person could hit one of the two buttons again? Could I not? If I didn't make it wait for the popup to be closed, would it spam the entire screen with a zillion little boxes that said "Close"? How does it know where to put the initial box on the screen? The box doesn't come up in the same place every time -- why is that? Fun times, people.) Anyway, if you press button 2, it says "Button 2 was pressed." If you press the third button, which says Quit, it quits cleanly. I realize that this is not particularly exciting just yet, but it's a start. :) Not building Rome, here. Building a box with three buttons in it.

The example had two boxes put in there already and left adding the "Quit" box as an exercise for the student. I added the Quit box and made it quit cleanly and everything. Go me!

Oh, and it's been ten days since I booted the laptop into XP. Not missing it, but it wasn't like I had *problems* with XP. I'm pretty gentle with computers -- don't tend to kill them the way n00bs seem to. I don't get viruses and I don't have problems with spyware and I do not understand what on earth makes normal people think purple gorilla applications on their desktop is a good idea. So, XP wasn't a burden or anything for me. I liked it well enough, but this has more toys of the type that are interesting to play with. The GTK is a toy, no assembly required. (That was a joke. A bad one.)