Glom on Windows

Wednesday, December 5. 2007

After porting Glom to maemo, the next target was Windows. Glom's dependencies are already ported to Windows, so getting it to work wasn't too hard, though some hacks were still necessary to get things going (see the Windows build instructions). Currently, only the client-only mode of Glom runs on Windows, but I hope the full version follows soon.

I installed Windows XP within a virtual machine on my laptop to do the port. The good thing is that this doesn't force me to leave my usual Linux environment, especially when I am not at home where I still have a desktop Linux machine. However, on the other hand compilation is slowed down pretty much, becoming really significant when compiling rather big C++ projects such as gtkmm and glom, probably due to memory constraints.

As always, pictures say more than a thousand words, so enjoy. The third screenshot shows a weird problem when scrolling directly after connecting to the database. The bug disappears when minimizing and re-maximizing the window. The screenshots are truncated to the left because the Glom Window requires more space than the 800x600 assigned to the virtual machine for the Small Business Example (which the screenshots are from). I could also use 1024x768 (the laptop has 1280x800), but I like to have a terminal or other windows next to the VM, and I don't like scrollbars in it either. Other drawbacks the current version suffers from and which I am going to tackle within the next days are listed in the Glom Wiki.

Posted by Armin Burgmeier in Openismus at 00:07 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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How did you manage to mention both maemo port and problems with 800x600 in the same post but be talking about two different issues?

presumably you must reduce the user interface for maemo, so why not bring that same clarity to all platforms?

I'm sure I'm only pointing out the obvious when I say information such as "Small business example" is redundantly repeated in the main window and the title bar, and information such as Mode Data might be better expressed in either the status bar or the view menu and harldy needs to be front and centre at all times. If you can manage a maemo port you must already know so much you could do to refine and clarify the interface of Glom and I can only encourage you to apply the valuable lessons you already know!

All criticism aside great to see you continuing to improve Glom and helping to tease Windows users with yet another great piece of Freedom Software.

#1 Alan (Homepage) on 2007-12-05 03:56 (Reply)

You are probably right that it is possible to save some space by removing some (redundant) information. This is however not specific to the Windows port.

Also note that the problem I talked about is that the window requires too much width, and it is mostly the job of the layout developer to fix that. On the other hand, most computers run at at least 1024x768 pixels, so this shouldn't be a problem anyway. Normally you don't need to run glom in a virtual machine with a smaller resolution when you can run it on the host system as well. All I wanted to do is to make clear that the truncated window is not a bug in the Windows port.

#1.1 Armin Burgmeier (Homepage) on 2007-12-05 16:31 (Reply)

By the way, I think vmware has a screenshot feature so you don't get the vmware window and controls in your screenshots.

#2 Murray Cuming (Homepage) on 2007-12-06 18:13 (Reply)

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