The initial version of CoreGTK, version 2.24.0, has been tagged for release today.
Features include:
Targets GTK+ 2.24 Support for GtkBuilder Can be used on Linux, Mac and Windows CoreGTK is an Objective-C language binding for the GTK+ widget toolkit. Like other “core” Objective-C libraries, CoreGTK is designed to be a thin wrapper. CoreGTK is free software, licensed under the GNU LGPL.
You can find more information about the project here and the release itself here.
A while back I made it my goal to put together an open source project as my way of contributing back to the community. Well fast forward a couple of months and my hobby project is finally ready to be shown the light of day. I give you… CoreGTK
CoreGTK is an Objective-C binding for the GTK+ library which wraps all objects descending from GtkWidget (plus a few others here and there).
I, probably like you, use open source software on a daily basis. From running operating systems, like Linux, to every day applications, like Firefox, it is very rare that I go an entire day of computing without using at least some open source code. And yet after years of doing so, and years of ignoring calls for donations from the various projects, I’ve never actually contributed any money toward the projects I use and love.
I came across a crowdfunding site for GnuPG with the tag line:
The world needs GnuPG encryption more than ever – a new website, new design, and new content will make strong crypto friendly.
If they can actually do something to make GnuPG, and computer security in general, more user friendly and approachable than it may actually be a cause worth supporting.
Recently I read an interesting article by Vint Cerf, mostly known as the man behind the TCP/IP protocol that underpins modern Internet communication, where he brought up a very scary problem with everything going digital. I’ll quote from the article (Cerf sees a problem: Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow – posted June 4, 2013) to explain:
One of the computer scientists who turned on the Internet in 1983, Vinton Cerf, is concerned that much of the data created since then, and for years still to come, will be lost to time.
These days you really need a strong, unique password for almost everything you do online. To make matters even worse for the average user, security nuts will tell you that you actually need a different password for essentially every account you hold. Why? Consider the following scenario:
Little Timmy signs up for Facebook using his super secret password @wesomeS@auce3!. This password is so strong and good that even he can hardly remember it.
If you’re like me, and you probably are, you do a terrible job of backing up your digital files life on a regular basis. Thankfully some smart people out there have made it awfully convenient to set up a backup system once and then more or less forget about it. My personal tool for the job is Areca Backup – while it is not without its flaws I find it an easy to use, feature rich, and cross-platform (essentially anything that runs Java) backup solution.
As sort of follow-up-in-spirit to my older post I decided to share a really straight forward way to use Objective-C to build GTK+ applications.
Objective-what?
Objective-C is an improvement to the iconic C programming language that remains backwards compatible while adding many new and interesting features. Chief among these additions is syntax for real objects (and thus object-oriented programming). Popularized by NeXT and eventually Apple, Objective-C is most commonly seen in development for Apple OSX and iOS based platforms.
This post was originally featured on The Linux Experiment
Open source software (OSS) is great. It’s powerful, community focused and, lets face it, free. There is not a single day that goes by that I don’t use OSS. Between Firefox, Linux Mint, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Pinta, Deluge, FileZilla and many, many more there is hardly ever an occasion where I find myself in a situation where there isn’t an OSS tool for the job.
After reading up on how you can use SWT to give Java a more native look and feel I was interested in giving it a shot first hand. I decided to break out old faithful (Hash Verifier) and re-write it completely in Java/SWT. The end result was an application that has essentially equivalent functionality (see below for differences) but is completely cross-platform. No matter what operating system you end up running this on (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux) it should have a native look and feel.
