Gnome Shell Message Tray Week 4

[Matt Novenstern <mnovenstern students colgate edu>]

This week, as with any learning experience, I've really learned how
little I know. As I mentioned last, week, I've moved non system status
icons down into the message tray in my local branch and I've been trying
to rework the system around that. This brought quite a few design points
forward including. The message tray, as it is, was not really designed
around the icons being important objects, they don't have a real way of
keeping track of which notifications are theirs, and most of the
management code for notifications and sources is in the message tray
object itself. What this means for me, is that I need to revamp how
sources and the message tray interact.

It's also posed a number of smaller problems that push my limits. In one
case, I have to try and get accurate hover information from an object
that contains an xwindow (the status icon). So I get hover signals from
the box the window is in, and the window itself. It takes me back to
electronics (I'm a physicist, not a computer scientist) and I'm trying
to implement a switch debouncer[1] at the moment to solve the problem.

I really don't have much to show for this week, between being sick and
spending a lot of time writing notes to myself about how to redesign
things. This past week and the next are finals here, so I've been a
little busy with that too. Once most of my classes stop this week, I
hope I'll have time to work on things during the weekdays, when most of
the helpful inhabitants of #gnome-shell are around.

I would add, though, that while I don't have anything really new to
show, I have learned that in most cases it's best to just jump in and
write something that you think might work, rather than labor over not
being sure how to do something. Half the time it at least partially
works and you figure out how to move forward.

-Matt

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debounce#Contact_bounce