I’ve finally been getting back into Gaim development a bit lately, outside of the status rewrite. The multi-field request API, which is used for abstracting request dialogs with various forms of input for a Gaim UI to generate dialogs from, got several improvements.
Some fields are marked now as required fields. If set, the UI can grey out the OK button when those fields aren’t filled out. This only applies to text entry fields at the moment, but support can easily be added for other types (if it makes sense for them).
An account field type was also added, which was the final piece allowing us to replace the New Instant Message and Get User Info dialogs with the request API. A lot of GTK+ code was removed from this change, and it improved consistency and HIG compliance.
And last but not least in this department, type hints have been added to fields, which the UI can use for additional functionality. The first use in Gaim is that if a text field has a type hint of “screenname,” the text field will get support for auto-completion of screen names.
And with that fun out of the way, work continues on the status rewrite. Oh so fun…