4.4 Further Topics

This book covers nearly everything in libgnome and libgnomeui , but a few things in the API remain :

gnome-i18n . The libgnomeui library has several functions for manipulating the gettext program (see Section 6.5). There aren't many real-life examples, so this book will not cover the API.
GnomeAppBar , a status bar with built-in progress meter and other accessories. Although the GNOME API does not mark this class as obsolete and notes that it "mostly" works, the documentation still discourages you from using any interactive features.
GnomeThumbnail , a system for getting thumbnail representations of image files.
GnomeIconList and GnomeIconSelection help the user select and manipulate groups of icons. Not only do these widgets seldom come up in practice, but there are also plans to replace them.
gnome-app-helper is an old, deprecated system for semi-automated graphical interface generation. You should use Glade instead; see Chapter 5.
Loading Pixbufs from URIs . With the help of various gdk_pixbuf_new_from_uri functions, libgnomeui allows you to load a GdkPixbuf synchronously or asynchronously via GnomeVFS.
GnomeCanvas is perhaps the most powerful GNOME widget. It is a scrollable, scalable surface where you can stack, manage, group , and otherwise manipulate graphical objects. It would take an entire book to cover this widget.

The canvas provides custom graphical elements that can either expand existing tools or build entirely new widget systems. The material here is meant as a guide for the existing widgets, not for building your own, so like GDK, the canvas does not fit in with the material in this book. If you want to know more about the canvas, have a look at [Pennington]. Although these documents cover the GNOME 1 API, they also mostly hold for GNOME 2.