Friday, December 10, 2010

Hot New Quickly Template Features

The Quickly Ubuntu Application template for Natty has cool new features already. Here's a couple of videos to highlight these changes.

Here are some changes contributed by Mike Terry. What he's done is:
  1. Reduce the code in the generate boiler plate down to about 65 lines. This makes it a lot easier to hack on and maintain.
  2. Make it so that you don't have to use the builder to access widgets that you've added in glade. Instead of "self.builder.get_object("entry1").set_text("hi"), you can just do self.ui.entry.set_text("hi"). In other words, Quickly just knows.
  3. The third thing demoed here is the new auto signals feature. Instead of picking a signal handler name, and defining it in Glade and in your code, if you follow some simple conventions when you name your function, Quickly will just know it's a signal handler, and it will work.




In this second video, you can see the much much much improved preferences system contributed by Tony Byrne. By following some naming conventions, and adding 2 lines of code, you can persist and access user settings with ease.

2 comments:

  1. Recently I found language Vala that is intendent to be used for UI development. The language looks really great and it is super fast.

    Is any change to see as a default language (instead of Python)?

    http://live.gnome.org/Vala

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  2. We are finding that vala is great for library development, but Python is still more powerful and easier for application development. We discussed porting quickly widgets to vala at UDS, but no one took any work items to actually do it. There is a project to make a vala template for quickly. You may want to look into contributing to that if you're really interested.

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