libview

Another release to talk about. As promised, libview 0.5.5 was released. It’s mainly a bug fix release with a couple of API additions. The highlights are as follows:

Release Notes:

• Fixed a bug in UIGroup where Merge wouldn’t call Unmerge if the group was already merged.
• Fixed a bug where deactivating the AutoDrawer while it was moving would not do the right thing.
• Added support for keeping the AutoDrawer open while the focus is inside it.
• Added support for setting an alignment in the Header widget.
• WrapLabel now wraps properly when being passed text in its constructor.

Woot! We finally released libview, VMware’s Incredibly Exciting Widgets! This has been very long planned, but it’s finally out. libview consists of many of the useful generic widgets we use inside the VMware Workstation code base. We have 16 widgets and one utility class currently in there, and have a list of widgets we plan to move into libview.

Now, this is not just a code dump, like some other companies have done. We will not be developing these widgets any further inside our own tree at VMware. libview on SourceForge is where the widgets will be developed from now on. They are under the MIT license, so feel free to use them for whatever. We will be setting up a web page and a listserv and stuff in the near future, and will commit some more widgets, bug fixes, and test apps.

Most of the widgets are written in C++ using gtkmm, so most projects won’t be able to take advantage of them as-is. We expect a lot of people will be re-implementing the parts they need for some projects. However, if you’re a project that uses the excellent gtkmm, these should Just Work (TM).

For a description of what’s included, see Philip’s blog, as he went into a bit of detail.