Re: Gnome Shell Message Tray Week 2

[Matt Novenstern <mnovenstern students colgate edu>]

On Sat, 2010-06-05 at 21:56 +0100, Tobias Mueller wrote:
> Hey Matt,
> 
> On 05.06.2010 21:43, Matt Novenstern wrote:
> > My second weekly report is up here:
> > http://perditusinventusque.blogspot.com/2010/06/gnome-shell-message-tray-week-2.html
> > 
> Would you mind including your report in your email? My eMail client
> already uses an insane amount of memory and I couldn't imagine firing up
> a webbrowser instance.
> 
> Thanks,
>   Tobi

Not a problem, here's the full text:



The story of my work on the message tray this week can be summed up in
two words - "more pictures." I've been trying to replicate the music
player mockup we have by getting the previous and next icons into the
notifications and getting the album art into the background. This has
resulted in two branches I'm working on at the moment. One is my attempt
to add an optional background image to notifications in general. This
has been (and continues to be) a lesson in the shell toolkit of widgets.
I'm still not entirely sure how they all work together, and some of them
have unexpected interactions (or lack thereof). My other branch, which
is doing its job nicely, implements icon buttons as part of normal
libnotify notifications. Without asking applications to add more info to
notifications, I made the code that haddles the actions sent in the
notification check to see if the action key corresponds to a stock icon,
if it does, icon button! This means I've patched my copy of rhythmbox to
send the next action as 'media-playback-next' or something like that,
but I hope that is an easy and relatively non-invasive way to make the
notifications more interesting with minimal effort.

While trying to implement things for the message tray, it's been
interesting seeing how the pro designers think about it. At first it was
a bit frustrating when marina was insisting on sticking to the
notification spec and not jumping right into writing mini dbus
applications for every program, but I think I'm starting to realize the
value of all that. She also has the uncanny ability to pop up in IRC
when I least expect her.

This past week, while I have gotten some things working, I've made quite
a mess of some code, and still need to polish things off. I don't tend
to have lots of time right now because classes are still in full swing
for me, so these weekends are my best work time.

In the coming week, I'd love to see the status icons moving down to the
message tray, once I've finished these bits up. I feel like that's an
important part in seeing how this all will fit together, but the project
is still pretty fluid, as people who follow development will know, and
we'll see where those up top think I'm best put to use in the coming
week.


Thanks for the interest,
 Matt