Monday March 10, 2008 New Chief Maintainer For Gcalctool
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I just announced this on the GNOME devel-announce-list mailing list. I'm not sure who that goes to, so I thought I'd announce it here too, so that at least readers of Planet GNOME will get to see it. |
Starting with GNOME 2.23, Robert Ancell will be taking over as the chief maintainer of gcalctool, the default calculator that comes with the GNOME distribution.
For GNOME 2.22, Robert did an excellent job of converting the gcalctool UI to use Glade, becoming intimately familiar with the code in the process. Since then he has continued to support gcalctool, and I thank him for his time and enthusiasm.
I know he has lots of great ideas for future work too.
I will still be around to make sure that the transition is as smooth as possible and to occasionally provide a bug fix or two.
The first version of this calculator was written in 1986. It's still out there on the net. It's come a long way since then. It's certainly more that 300 lines of code and 1/2 MB in size nowadays.
I'd like to thanks everybody who has helped make [g]calctool what it is today. See the AUTHORS file in the latest source distribution for a potted history.
( Mar 10 2008, 09:13:04 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [6]
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...I don't suppose they're likely to just use gtk qalculate by default...
I filed a bug against gcalctool before I found out the other existed. Now I use that instead.
Posted by ethana2 on March 10, 2008 at 10:18 AM PDT #
ethana2, it's oranges and apples. gcalctool
doesn't attempt to do what qalculate does.
If/when the default calculator for GNOME should
be a graphing calculator with all the extra
functionality that qalculate provides, then
I agree; gcalctool should get out of the way
and qalculate would be a good choice as a
replacement.
Posted by 24.6.152.125 on March 10, 2008 at 11:55 AM PDT #
It's a pitty he didn't use GtkBuilder, introduced in GTK 2.12...
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/gtk-migrating-GtkBuilder.html
Posted by liberforce on March 10, 2008 at 02:46 PM PDT #
liberforce, looks like it still needs work:
"GtkBuilder does not yet implement support for accessibility properties. It parses the same <accessibility> elements as libglade, but ignores them. See bug 454983 for the current status of accessibility support in GtkBuilder."
Therefore any application that uses GtkBuilder
is inaccessible.
Perhaps when this is fixed it'll be a useful
tool.
Posted by Rich Burridge on March 10, 2008 at 03:08 PM PDT #
Oops! Maybe I spoke too soon. Looks like
that bug was resolved on 25th January 2008.
Hopefully people will be able to build accessible
applications with GtkBuilder very soon now.
Posted by Rich Burridge on March 10, 2008 at 03:10 PM PDT #
w.r.t.: "Hopefully people will be able to build accessible applications with GtkBuilder very soon now." Indeed. But of course, just because one *is able to* build accessible applications doesn't mean that one *does* build accessible applications. You and I both know that all too well, Rich....
Maybe qalculate is accessible (aside from the difficulties inherent in non-visual access to the display of a graphing calculator). I don't know because I haven't tried it yet. What I do know, and what is really the point I want to make here because I know that you won't make it yourself ;-) is this:
The reason why the GNOME desktop has a calculator that is very usable by folks who are blind or visually impaired is because you have worked hard to ensure that gcalctool is, and remains, fully accessible. Your efforts are appreciated -- and deserve some recognition IMHO. :-)
Posted by joanie on March 10, 2008 at 06:31 PM PDT #