Google SoC: Gtk# Ribbon Library

This is the first on a series of posts to comment on the results from the students that contributed to Mono as part of the Google Summer of Code.

Laurent Debacker completed his Ribbons widget for Gtk#:

You can also see the widget in action in the following screencast: Ribbons-final.ogg.

Laurent posted his final SoC status report on this blog entry.

Laurent needs a special mention because he also documented this class.

My hope for this widget would be:

• To move the widget to Mono's SVN repository from the Summer of Code temporary repository.
• To start packaging it for developers to start using and provide packages for multiple distributions.
• Get applications to start using the Ribbon. Am I crazy thinking that MonoDevelop could take advantage of the Ribbon to better expose the extensive functionality it has?
  Nobody has used the Ribbon for an IDE before. This has a lot of potential.

Update2: Laurent followed up with a proposal that he had drafted to improve MonoDevelop with the Ribbon UI. What a funny coincidence!

Update: Alan found some nice prior-art applications that used the Ribbon-like interface:

• DreamWeaver.
• Bluefish.
• Blender.

Alan posted on some blog comments a few months ago a much better screenshot. If you own that blog, and remember it, please post the link.