NickTelford.net

I’m no artist and when it comes to design it usually takes me several attempts to get it right. This is where rapid prototyping comes in handy. Being able to quickly and easily produce a design, twist, turn and tweak it or simply throw it away and start again is a vital process to any application design.

Step up Glade

Glade is probably one of the most underrated development tools for Gnome. It makes prototyping an interface a sinch, with no need to worry about typing out laborious GTK+ code; move everything around, add and remove features from your design and mess around with settings quickly and easily until you have something you’re happy with.

Once you have your final UI design, you have two options. Either use libglade to set up your application UI or convert the glade UI in to real GTK+ code by hand.

The former is far simpler, but the latter adds more flexability, removes redundant widgets and a dependancy on libglade and increases performance.

Converting the Glade XML by hand isn’t as much of a chore as it sounds. Widgets in the Glade XML only define options that have non-default values so you simply need to arm yourself with the GTK+ documentation, run down the XML and implement each widget, adding children where necessary.

Guest starring: Anjuta

While Glade is great for prototyping a UI, testing your UI (Glade appears to render slightly differently to GTK+, so it’s a good idea to run the prototype properly), converting it to GTK+ code and of course, writing the actual program code is a necessity. While gedit, vim and emacs are all fine for the job, creating a source tree and build system for your application can be a bit of a nightmare.

There’s nothing worse than spending more time debugging your build scripts than your program code.

Anjuta makes it all easy – while it may not generate the most optimal build scripts – it does a good job of providing you with a source tree that will build without the need for any tweaking. Which is perfect for testing your UI prototype quickly and without fuss.

I’m just starting out with GTK+ programming and, in fact, C; but I’m already finding tools that make the learning curve so much less steep.

There is a decades old stereotype of students. We party, we drink, we sleep and generally do as little work as possible. The Young Ones depicted a comical view of student life on the breadline, but it seems that many people have forgotten just how little money students really have.

The goverment appear to think that students have a lot more money than they do, made evident by the introduction and steady increase of tuition fees. They say this helps poorer students by subsidising them, while charging students from a wealthier background. However, as with most tax systems, the middle class end up paying a premium they cannot afford.

This misconception goes further than individual students. The Evangelical Christian Union at the University of Exeter have recently filed papers against the Students’ Guild in the High Court and are demanding that the Students’ Guild pay their legal fees, which are apparently in excess of £10,000.
The reasoning must go something like this:

• Students have money
• Student unions are made of lots of students
• Therefore student unions must have a lot of money!

Of course, this simply is not true. £10,000 would be a massive blow to the Students’ Guild and would detrimentally affect all students across the Exeter campus. Ironically, since the Evangelical Christian Union are partially funded by the Students’ Guild and their members use the many Guild facilities every day, they would suffer as much as the rest of us.

Recent research has shown that with inflated living costs, increases in duty on alcohol and economical victimisation of students through schemes such as tuition fees; student drinking and partying has declined significantly, the number of students in part-time employment has risen significantly, as has the average debt level upon graduation.

The decades old stereotype of The Young Ones is beginning to disappear, being replaced by a student population that is working around the clock to pay the rent and too penny-less to party. I think it’s time to give students a break.

I remember going to school and knowing, without a doubt, that the teachers knew what they were talking about. After all, that’s their job. This feeling of security continued throughout secondary school and college, but after just one term at University, I had lost faith in the entire higher education system.

I’ve been at University for a year and a half now and, ignoring the social aspects, I have to say I feel cheated out of my money. I think that my three years here will be the longest pause in education of my life.

Before University, I took a year out doing contract work using my somewhat limited knowledge of PHP. The fact that I had a job doing something I knew little about forced me to learn more than I ever thought possible. This, along with some very long train journeys and some excellent books on design patterns, allowed me to learn more about PHP and object-oriented programming than some learn in the 3 years it takes to get a degree.

Of course, this should not be. My time in higher education is supposed to be a rewarding experience (that reward being a degree). So what’s the point of a degree if you don’t actually learn anything useful?

I know several people who would shoot me down, saying I am too complacent and should attend more lectures. This may be true, but people who actually do work still come out of their final year with a poor understanding of the subject.

Some good has come out of this. Inspired by authors, both electronic and in print, I have recently become quite keen to go in to lecturing myself and hopefully publish a book or two to help future generations of students graduate with more than just a piece of paper.

It’s also a great opportunity to take a few years out of my life, kick back and relax. After all, what else is a student loan for?