A large goal of the Gourciferous project is to create a GUI that will make processing GIT logs and rendering Gource videos a lot easier. For the past few days I have been working on creating some mock-ups for the GUI in Glade. The benefit of using Glade is that the mock-up can easily become a functional GUI by adding a Python program to create functionality. However, using Glade hasn't been a picnic.

Originally the software seemed incredibly intuitive. The buttons are simple, and it truly on takes a few minutes of tinkering to start creating a GUI that looks pretty nice. After I started though, designing the GUI became much more difficult. One of my biggest challenges was the lack of a tutorial that was really all-encompassing of Glade. There were some fine tutorials that walked you through a project and gave you some code to add functionality, but a lot of them lacked guide to building your own GUI, including what all the many options Glade has actually do! One of the most helpful tutorials was by Micah Carrick. His guides were a great resource to understand GTK+, some Glade configurations, and the difference between using C and Python with Glade.

By far, the most frustrating aspect of my brief stint with Glade was its buggy nature. On my laptop, which is running Fedora 18, would consistently segfault while I was working. Most commonly, it seemed to happen while I was adding and deleting widgets. I was unfamiliar with all of the tools available and would often try an option, only to decide I didn't like it and try to remove it. Then the program would freeze and crash. I submitted a bug report with all the info from my segfaults. I'm not sure if this is a problem isolated to my laptop but no matter what, it was frustrating.

For now we are moving past the GUI to focus on creating rendered videos for Red Hat. Our most important goal is getting some great videos created to visualize the contributions of the amazing Red Hat community. Hopefully once we get these done we can put some more time into making Gource more accessible.