view PROGRAMMING_NOTES @ 4946:154eb3188788

[gaim-migrate @ 5280] Another gaim first, ladies and gentlemen! I've been reading some books and sites on interface design and realized something. The natural order for humans (or at least Western people?) is a top-down approach. Menus drop down. Webpages go from top to bottom. You tend to scroll down rather than up. Everything goes from the top to the bottom. Apple realizes this, and that's why the menubar has always been at the top. Microsoft never really grasped this, and we all know how clunky the Start button feels. So this commit puts the input box on IMs (I'll get to chats after school) above the gtkimhtml widget. This feels much more natural, as what you type then jumps down to the input widget. Though it may look odd at first, you'll all realize just how comfortable gaim is now in comparison to any other IM client. committer: Tailor Script <[e-mail]>

Notes on keeping GAIM OS independant
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General
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- Use G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S and G_DIR_SEPARATOR for paths

- Use g_getenv, g_snprintf, g_vsnprintf

- Use gaim_home_dir instead of g_get_home_dir or g_getenv("HOME")

- Make sure when including win32dep.h that it is the last header to
  be included.

- Open binary files when reading or writing with 'b' mode.

  e.g: fopen("somefile", "wb");

  Not doing so will open files in windows using defaut translation mode. 
  i.e. newline -> <CR><LF>

Paths
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- DATADIR, LOCALEDIR & LIBDIR are defined in wingaim as functions.
  Doing the following will therefore break the windows build:

  printf("File in DATADIR is: %s\n", DATADIR G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S "pic.png");

  it should be:

  printf("File in DATADIR is: %s%s%s\n", DATADIR, G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S, "pic.png");

PLUGINS & PROTOS
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- G_MODULE_EXPORT all functions which are to be accessed from outside the
  scope of its "dll" or "so". (E.G. gaim_plugin_init)

- G_MODULE_IMPORT all global variables which are located outside your
  dynamic library. (E.G. connections)

  (Not doing this will cause "Memory Access Violations" in Win32)