14 DAY TRIAL // Emmanuele Bassi, senior software engineer at Endless and GNOME/GTK+ collaborator, reports today, November 28, 2016, on the work that has been done this last week for the cross-platform and open-source GTK+ GUI toolkit.
With 1551 lines added and 1998 lines removed, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 40 commits since Emmanuele Bassi's last report, and it appears that the first GTK+ 4 development snapshot is now ready for public testing, versioned 3.89.1. According to the current GTK+ road map, all deprecated APIs have now been removed.
Three developers have contributed various interesting improvements to the master branch of GTK+, including Andrew Chadwick, who landed better graphic tablet support for Windows platforms, and Lapo Calamandrei, who managed to update the Adwaita and High Contrast themes with the latest gradients and progress bars CSS work.
On the other hand, Benjamin Otte removed the gdk_window_process_all_updates(), gdk_window_process_updates(), and gtk_cairo_should_draw_window() functions, since they are no longer needed for GTK+ 4. "GDK has long since been switched to a frame clock; additionally, only top level GdkWindow can be used as a rendering surface," reads the report.
Wayland added to GSK's dependencies
A number of bugs have been fixed as well this past week on the master branch of GTK+. Some notable changes include the addition of the next-generation Wayland display server to the dependencies of GSK (GTK Scene Kit), as well as support for placing child subsurfaces relative to their parent under Wayland.
The GtkProgressbar, GtkLabelAccessible, GtkMenu, GtkNotebook, and GtkTextHandle widgets received various improvements as well, and it looks like window shadows are now repainted even if only the contents of the respective window have been changed. Also, the Inspector was updated to ensure controller was a GtkGesture.
You can download GTK+ 3.89.1 right now from our website if you want to get an early taste of what's coming to GTK+ 4. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release build, which means that it contains known or unknown issues, so don't install it on a production machine.