
1. ABOUT GIDEON DESIGNER
2. RELEASE NOTES
3. INSTALLATION
   * General Info
   * GNU/Linux and *BSD Installation
   * What's Installed
   * Windows Installation (MinGW)
4. HOW TO REPORT BUGS


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1. About Gideon Designer
========================

Gideon is an innovative GUI builder for GTK+. It is an advanced IDE-embeddable RAD tool designed to fulfill the needs of desktop programmers who want to create multi-platform GTK+ based applications with minimal GUI coding. Gideon is full-featured yet elegant: its unique Property Explorer solves many GUI constructing tasks in a versatile manner without additional popup dialogs. The project is targeted to develop a tool that is coherent and highly productive for GTK+ experts as well as simple and accessible for newcomers.

Project Home: http://gideon.sourceforge.net
Gideon Forum: http://groups.google.com/group/gideondesigner


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2. Release Notes
================

2.7.1, 2006/07/29

* Added icon gideon.png with temporary logo
* Fixed Polytree grid rendering problem on GTK+ 2.10
* Internal improvements and cleanups


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3. Installation
===============

**** General Info

'INSTALL' file contains general installation instructions. More hints on 'configure'-based installations may be found in GTK+ manual: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-building.html

**** GNU/Linux and *BSD Installation

Gideon compilation requires runtime and development packages of this software installed:

- gtk+-2.0
- guiloader-c++
- gnome-vfs

Building and installing Gideon may be performed with standard commands executed from the toplevel distribution directory 'gideon-x.y.z':

$ ./configure
$ make
<become root if necessary>
# make install

Gideon 'configure' script supports --enable-hiddenvisibility option that passes -fvisibility=hidden flag to the GCC compiler. This compilation mode produces significantly smaller C++ executables and more optimized code on ELF platforms. Unfortunately Gideon crashes when compiled (with GCC 4.1 or earlier) in such a way; hopefully this will change in future GCC releases.

**** What's Installed

Designer executable:  bin/gideon
Gideon library:       lib/libgideon.*
Pkg-config file:      lib/pkg-config/gideon.pc
Header file:          include/gideon/gideon.h
Desktop entry:        share/applications/gideon.desktop
Desktop icon:         share/pixmaps/gideon.png

**** Windows Installation (MinGW)

NOTE: The preferable way to build Gideon for Windows is to use MSVC 8.0 compiler; README.msvc contains detailed instructions on how to do this with Boost.Build system.

Assuming that corresponding instructions in GuiLoader/C++ package README are already followed, Gideon may be built and installed with these commands executed in MSYS window from the toplevel distribution directory 'gideon-x.y.z':

$ ./configure --enable-wingideon
$ make LDFLAGS="-mwindows"
$ make install


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4. How to Report Bugs
=====================

Bug reports should be posted to the Gideon Forum. Reports should include all relevant information if possible:

* Gideon Designer and GuiLoader versions
* versions of OS and distribution
* full versions of GTK+ and compiler 
* program output and crash dialog text 
* procedure to reproduce the bug
* .gui files and source code
* everything else that might help

English grammar, spelling and style corrections are highly appreciated!
