Gtk 3 plans laid out

For the last few years, Gtk 2 has done a grand job as the widget toolkit for Gnome, Gimp, Firefox, AbiWord and other top-tier free software projects. But it's getting a bit long in the tooth now, so the Gtk team has knocked together a preliminary roadmap for the next major release. The highlights? Resolution independence for ultra-smooth GUI scaling, along with offscreen rendering for animations and special effects.

Other goals include a simplified API for developers, better handling of non-visible characters, flippable widgets and a tool palette widget. The team is also looking for contributors to add these goodies to Gtk 3:

• Animated containers in which widgets can slide around
• Physics features - magnetism, bouncy scrolling, friction, blending
• Spinning progress widget (aka "throbber")
• Simpler event handling that moves away from X Window System concepts
• Support for multi-touch devices

No timeline for the release has yet been set, but when the roadmap becomes more solid we should get an idea of when version 3 will be due.

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