Writing panel applets?

["Eric M. Ludlam" <zappo ultranet com>]

I've been trying to understand applets for the panel recently, and
much about them seems straight forward, though I have one problem, and
one suggestion.

First, "panel.h" and "applet-lib.h" are not installed with any of the
-devel RPMs.  (At least, I have no clue where they are hiding.)  This
will make it quite hard for me to make a separate distribution w/ an
applet that gets configure'd right.

Also, is it it possible to subclass an applet?  I think this would
be very useful.  While fiddling, I found that I just copied "launcher"
and added a few things to it.  That's a lot of duplicated code.

Why would I subclass launcher?  I'm glad you asked!  I'd like my app
to sit there, and if a talk request comes in, it would change it's
image (similar to mailcheck) and maybe fork off a sound event of some
sort.  At the same time, I'd like the user to click on it, and have it
execute "gtalk -r" or "ytalk user@machine", using those nifty launcher
features.  The only thing launcher is missing is the code to get talk
requests, and that happens to be something I know how to do. ;)

I think mailcheck, and even cpuload would benefit from this too, since
mailcheck would like to launch/talk to balsa, (or whatever), and the
cpumeter would probably like to launch gtop (or whatever).  The clock
might want to launch the calendar.  See the pattern?

Due to the nature of Corba in C, this might not be as easy at it
sounds.  If corba events were translated into gtk style signals for a
stock applet, the coolness factor would be impressive, and make
writing applets for add-ons easier.

Anyway, I hope the needed header files appear in one of the periodic
RPMS soon, or that someone could inform me of my error.

Have fun
Eric

-- 
|\/\/\___/\/\/|  Eric Ludlam                 zappo@gnu.org; zappo@ultranet.com
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