Toolkit advice for n00bish programmer

[Mongrol]

Hi folks,

I haven't done any C coding for a few years now, and none on 'nix's but I quite fancy starting. My chosen project is a "toolbar/panel" for the reason that this is one area where there's lots of choice around but basically they are all crap (apologies to any readers who are authors of one). I see little or no innovation in the realms of X gui design and I think I have some good (or at least fresh) ideas. So...

To program this panel/toolbar thingummy I`m going to need a toolkit of sorts. I`ve decided against QT as I`m not interested in incorporating any KDE framework in my code. Likewise I`m not interesting in Gnome framework either. Not yet anyway. I've been looking at GTK+ as it seems quite a simple and maturing toolkit however I have some questions.

One of the design requirements of my panel is ultimate flexibility. I want it to be skinnable or invisible. I want it to be fully scalable and possible to be fully rendered or at least decorated using vectors (librsvg possible). I want it, if the user wishes, to be able to fully emulate OSX's dock. Not that I particularly like the OSX dock, as a modern,usable piece of GUI design it is not but that demonstrates the "power" of which I want my panel to have. Could GTK+ suit my needs? And if not are their other toolkits with the power to do this? Or am I destined to do the whole in xlib? Infact, would I be better off, and end up with a better result if I done it in xlib anyway?

Thanks for any comments.

[Mitchybums]

I am sort of planning the same. Wanna make something like the Apple OSX bar.
So far my options are xlib and openGL. as I am also a newbie, I learned today how to actualy put a windowthingy on my screen. I got some samples if you want them.
the samples I found on the web are kinda old, so some stuff wont work, but at least it's a start