Re: Applet background with panel pixmaps

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 09:07:28PM -0500, Alan Shutko wrote:
> I'm working on the gnome-pilot applet and trying to make the area
> around our pixmap fully merge into the panel, however it's set.
> That's easy to do until the user starts setting background colors or
> pixmaps in the panel.
> 
> Upon consulting the printer applet, I discovered the back_change
> signal.  That works well for panel bg colors, but if you use a
> background pixmap, the pixmap of the applet won't match up with the
> pixmap in the panel.  No good.  You can see this problem as well in
> the printer applet, just set a background panel pixmap.
> 
> So, is there any way to fix this?

two options:

1) use the new do_draw signal and rgb buffers to draw yourself.  That's only
in the newest HEAD of gnome-core and is not the most efficent.  But it allows
you to do full alpha blending into the panel background.

2) use the hack that asclock uses, but I must warn you it's an extremely ugly
ugly ugly hack.  it sets the xwindow shapemask on the applet widget window
and on the underlying eventbox of the socket as well.  I will add interface
to new gnome-core to set the shapemask cleanly, but that's not there yet.

The back_change signal is just bad I guess though it might be useful for
certain limited things.

I would probably recommend just staying with the not so nice back_change
solution for now and then moving to #1 or when #2 can be done cleanly,
depending on what you need, for gnome 2.0.

George