Re: [gnome-love] New URL based "Location Bar" Panel Applet



Hola!

On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 15:38 -0700, Jason Toffaletti wrote:
I'm writing a panel applet that acts like the location bar of a browser.
Here are some examples of use:

input: "user host" and it launches your prefered email client
input: "www.slashdot.org" and it launches your prefered web browser
input: "/usr/local/bin" and it opens in nautilus
input: "gg:gnome" and launches a google for "gnome"

This last example is similar to the shortcuts in Konq or Firefox. Where
the user defines a url with a %s to be replaced by the input, and a
shortcut such as gg, google, dict, imdb, etc.

I am also considering adding support for MyCroft
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

I have a working prototype written in Python which can be seen here:
http://subterrific.net/~jason/Screenshot.png

Now for the part where I ask for help. I plan on rewriting this in C
with the goal of getting it included in GNOME, if there is enough
interest. This is my first experience developing with GNOME, so I'm
totally unfamiliar with the community and how things are done. I need
someone or several people to mentor me and make sure I'm going in the
right direction to meet my goal of having this project become part of
GNOME. For starters, I need to know the proper way of handling URLs.
Right now, I am using GConf to look at
"/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command", which seems correct although
a bit low level. I'd also like to make the panel applet resizable as
well as movable with the handle. I noticed using the applet flags
HAS_HANDLE and EXPAND_MAJOR gives me the resizing, so I tried watching
for the CTRL key and toggling EXPAND_MAJOR on/off so the user could
either resize or move with the handle, but it doesn't work the way I
expected so I need some help with that. I also had to work around some
rather odd behavior from GtkEntry with focus-in-event and
button-press-event, and I'm wondering if its something I should fix/file
a bug on/etc.

P.S. - I am jason in #gnome-love on GIMPNet, if you feel like helping me
out.

Two things, a suggestion and an idea:

1) Porting your app to C might be fun, but is probably not worth the
pain! C is not really a good language to write applications in... I'd
just stick with python, and concentrate on making your app rock. In any
case, it is not unconceivable that a python app be included in the
Desktop release; the case would need to be made and so on, but most
people do seem to consider python to be ‘not evil’ ;-)

2) OTOH, what you are doing could nicely be integrated into nautilus
location entries (hit Ctrl-L on a nautilus window) and doing it there
might be a more natural place.

In fact, typing "www.gnome.org" in that dialog already does do something
(probably not what I'd expect it to do...) The other stuff is not
handled, but IMHO it would be a very good place to do that. Even the
Firefox-like keywords sounds like a good idea (but trying not to make
stuff look like url schemes (as in gg:whatever) because inventing new
schemes is evil)

If nautilus would pop up the dialog when the desktop is focused it'd be
stellarly nice.

-- m


-- 
Mariano Suárez-Alvarez <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar>
http://www.gnome.org/~mariano

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