After two days of hacking, I have made some significant progress! We have a super early alpha preview in development version of GTK3 Pinta, in which everything works except for minor stuff like toolbars, effects, addins, and the canvas.

There are four major pain points: One is that we use Mono.Addins.GUI for managing add-ins and that is still GTK2. The second is that we have a lot of advanced dockable, resizable widgets loaned from Monodevelop and lots of Stetic-generated UI, that are not very straightforward to translate to GTK3. The third is that the GDK drawing APIs are the one thing in GTK that has been changed the most and had the most stuff removed, and being a drawing program we depend a lot on this. Finally, the GTK Ruler widget has been removed completely from GTK, which complicates things for us since we will have to create a custom one.

So today I will probably focus on other stuff. Stephen Shaw and myself are both interested in Mono.Addins, so together with Andrea Gaita we will be looking into GTK#3-ising it so  we’ll have building blocks in place. Also, since GNOME recently reorganised live.gnome.org to wiki.gnome.org, all of Tomboy’s wiki pages are borked and need fixing so I’ll do that. I’m also considering looking into seeing what Tomboy needs for GTK#3, since it has a lot less advanced UI.

As usual, we must thank the sponsors for their generous contributions allowing this hackfest to happen:

Norkart AS, Norway’s premier supplier of Geographic Information Systems and related consulting and my most lovely employer (website, logo)

Collabora Ltd, Open Source Consulting (website, logo)

Hotel Schottenpoint, Our hotel partner (website, logo)

Novacoast IT, Professional Services and Product Development (website, logo)

The GNOME Foundation, providers of the GNOME desktop (website, logo)

Venue sponsor:

• The University of Vienna (website, logo)
• Institute for Theoretical Chemistry (website)

It’s been a long time since last year’s hackfest, but I finally have an add-in server for Pinta up and running at server.robpvn.net! Obviously it’s still a bit of a beta test, the most obvious immaturity being that I haven’t procured a proper Pinta-project subdomain for it yet. Apart from that, there’s trouble serving add-ins to Windows because the Windows GTK# installer doesn’t bundle a .NET 4 version of Mono.Posix like everyone in Linux-land has now. But I’m sure we’ll sort something out in that department!

In the meantime, I’ve been picking some low hanging fruit when it comes to making Pinta add-ins. I tried looking at Paint.Net plugins to see if there was anything nice to be ported, but I couldn’t find anything that had both source and an open source licence. There might be something out there, but since their system for administrating plugins is a forum where people post zip files, it’s kind of hard to get an overview. I’m proud to say that Pinta already has a smoother delivery system!

So what I ended up doing was looking at names of add-ins and picking one that seemed easy to re-implement. Easiest of them all: a Night Vision effect. This very simple add-in takes an image and changes the colour values so it looks like it was taken with a night vision camera. If you then do a pass with the Noise filter and maybe some of the other effects, it can look quite good!

There’s still a lot missing here, like any way of adjusting parameters and a GUI. Also, hooking in to the other effects for more advanced filters would be nice. But my plan is to spread the new add-ins thin, and give them the minimum possible to work so that we can build up a nice array of add-ins before going back to make them more advanced. Or even better, if someone else finds it interesting they can work on improving it. (As usual, it’s all on Github.)

They say that every contribution to open source software starts with a developer scratching his or her own itch, and this is probably true. (It certainly is for me!) The problem is that as a project grows in popularity and users, you have to start paying attention to other people’s itches. A common type of itch-scratching, which is important both because it can make your program more accessible to new users and because it draws in new contributors, is translation.

Lots of lovely people spend time translating various programs to their native languages, but often they don’t have the programming knowledge that’s needed to make changes to the actual program. Which means that whenever you as a programmer add a some text to the program that is untranslatable because you forgot to call the translations or concatenate it in some way that hinders translation lookups, you are hindering them from scratching their itch and new users from getting a completely satisfactory experience.

Personally I’m horrible about this, probably because I think in English and always have my systems set to English.  It’s a time-honoured tradition that whenever I add any new feature to a program, be it Pinta or Tomboy, I forget that someone has to be able to translate this. This leads to extra work for testers and translators because they have to find my mistakes, and then again for me because I have to fix them. The other thing one might do is to not realize that a particular piece of text can mean different things depending on where it is. An example from Pinta is “Open Images”, which in one context is a command to open several files at once, but in another context is a description of a list of already opened files. For some languages there is a distinct difference in words depending on the context, which again means more work to either clarify the context in translation notes or find different wording.

So if you want to be a tidy and efficient programmer, there’s one more thing you have to check before you commit: Go over what you’ve written and ask yourself “Is this technically translatable?” and then “Can this text have multiple meanings depending on context?”. Think of the translators!