Pygtk on John Stowers

End of an Era: PyGTK

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:48:08 +0000

I just released PyGTK 2.24, which will almost certainly be the last major PyGTK release. The future of Python on the GNOME platform is PyGObject + GObject Introspection . From my experience over the last few months porting a number of my projects, the future is bright.

In a cruel twist of irony, the state of PyGTK on Windows and Mac has never been better. The credit for the windows work (and some great documentation improvements this cycle) must go to Dieter Verfaillie

PyGTK All-in-one Installer for Windows

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:18:25 +0000

The PyGTK team is pleased to announce the return of the highly popular all-in-one installer for Windows.

The PyGTK All-in-one installer provides an alternative installation method for PyGTK users on Windows. It bundles PyGTK, PyGObject, PyCairo, PyGtkSourceView2, PyGooCanvas, PyRsvg, the gtk+-bundle and Glade in one handy installer.

Currently 32 bit Python 2.6 and 2.7 versions are supported on Windows XP and above.

Dieter Verfaillie deserves enormous thanks for this work. Firstly, he performed the tedious job of ensuring that all the component MSI installers were exactly correct, and secondly, the really difficult task of deconstructing these individual installers and reassembling their contents into a single cohesive executable.

Misc Hacking

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:22:39 +0000

I had two days off while I moved offices, so I got a chance to catch up on my backlog of random hacking.

osm-gps-map

I released osm-gps-map v0.5.0 which adds a few new features (such as keyboard navigation) but also contains many bugfixes and performance improvements. Check the release notes for more information. The next item on the TODO is merging the OSD/layers branch.

Conduit

I released Conduit 0.3.17 which was long overdue. Mostly a bugfix release and updating to new API. The Conduit homepage has also moved to live.gnome.org. Progress on Conduit is a bit slow at the moment, it does everything I want it to (I have a budget cellphone so phone synce does not interest me), and is pretty stable. I have some SOC work I would like to merge, but basically I am looking for developers and inspiration…

Gtk+ Map Widget

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:14:06 +0000

It has been a long time between blogs. I thought I should talk about the piece of software that has been responsible for the most emails in my inbox over the last few days - osm-gps-map, the Gtk+ based map widget . What started as a widget for use in one small application of mine has grown considerably.

I recently released 0.4.0 , a bugfix release.
I created a mailing list , if you are a user or interested osm-gps-map, them please join.

Back into the swing of things

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:38:06 +0000

It has been a long time between posts, but I am back in New Zealand now, and vowing to get back on top of this blogging thing. I will post more in the coming weeks about my time in France with the ENAC crew, but I will start today small; by releasing some code I have been hacking on.

I wanted a small project to get back into the desktop development mindset after being in the embedded C (ARM 7 LPC2148) and OpenEmbedded (Beagleboard and Gumsix Overo) world for a while. I am also ecstatic that git was clearly the most popular DVCS in the recent survey, I really hope it provides the impetus for GNOME to move to a DVCS.

Threading and (py)Gtk

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 02:58:31 +0000

At the request of a few people I have made a demo to share , showing how I do threading in a pygtk application (Conduit ). I find the following approach seems to work reliably and requires little code. Other approaches can be found here and here .

This approach takes advantage of the fact that signal emission in glib has been threadsafe since glib 2.8 (IIRC). All communication with the GUI is done via gobject signals. There is definitely a compromise in the level of GUI fiddling that you can do, particularly when compared with the threads_enter/leave approach. However, I have found this signal based approach sufficent in my case, and that it encourages me to decouple the slow blocking tasks from the GUI.