Re: Development Ideas

[Todd Kulesza <todd dropline net>]

Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-06-19 at 16:08 -0400, Todd Kulesza wrote:
>
> > 1) Panel Applet - It would rock to have an applet in the GNOME Panel 
> > that would handle the authentication stuff for Drivel.  When a user 
> > clicks on it, up pops an editing window, instantly ready to go.
>
> It's an interesting idea. Although, is it just a feature for the sake of
> features? Would you have it replace the use of the notification tray if
> the user was using it?

I've tried to follow the HIG and keep the notification tray purely for 
notification; Drivel doesn't sit in that area like Gaim does.  I'd like 
to go the "proper" route and use a panel applet as a way of keeping 
Drivel running and logged in, which would eliminate the authentication 
time when users start Drivel.

> It might be fun to look at using libnotify to inform users of new blog
> posts. It's pretty easy to do, I just don't have my account paid up so I
> can't easily test it.

I can test it :)
As an aside, I wonder if we could request permanant accounts for being 
client authors...

 > GtkHTML remains the way to do this. These days I'm generally feeling
> braver with Bonobo, I should give it another swing.

That would be awesome!

> The biggest thing that can help you in terms of getting support for a
> panel applet, is not having any global state. All the state for an
> instance of an applet is stored in structs that are passed around, never
> globally. This is because applets are factories, so global data really
> is global. That said, I don't think there are too many problems with
> this that I remember in Drivel.

Yeah, the state is stored in a giant struct which is passed to every 
function in the world.  It's a pain, but it does allow multiple 
instances in this case.  There's some global locking variables in the 
network code, but those could be cleaned up.

Cheers,
Todd