GTK+-2.4 adds significant new functionality while maintaining source and binary compatibility with GTK+-2.2. Highlights of new features and improvements in GTK+-2.4 are:

New file selector widget

The new GtkFileChooser widgets provide a radically simplified and improved way for users to select files. Capabilities such as customizable filters and previews are now available for application writers. The filesystem access is encapsulated as a dynamically loaded module; as an example of what this allows, libgnomeui now provides a gnome-vfs backend for GtkFileChooser so that it has the same view of remote filesystems as applications such Nautilus.

New drop-down selection widget

The GtkComboBox widget replaces the old GtkOptionMenu and GtkCombo widgets with a single unified appearance and programming interface for both editable and non-editable dropdowns. Other enhancements provided include customizability of the main display widget and grid layouts for the drop-down menu.

Action-based toolbar and menu API

GtkUIManager allows the application to specify a set of "actions", then create menus and toolbars using those actions from an XML-like interface description. This separation makes it easier to coordinate having the same item both in a menu and in a toolbar and simplifies the implementation of toolbar editing.

Bidirectional editing and interface flipping improvements

GTK+ now automatically determines the base direction for label and text-entry widgets based on their contents, rather than requiring it to be specified by the application; this gives a much better user experience when editing mixed right-to-left and left-to-right text. Support for user-interface mirroring in right-to-left locales has now been extended to cover virtually all widgets.

gtk+-2.4.0.tar.bz2 md5sum: fd16157de447c7f0a86495ad0dc67a1b
gtk+-2.4.0.tar.gz md5sum: 404d3496eb8ba6c38eb6f2392244a35a