Gnome Shell Message Tray, week 5

[Matt Novenstern <mnovenstern students colgate edu>]

With the end of most of my classes here, it's gotten a lot easier to sit
down for long stretches of time to work on coding. I forgot about the
report last week, which is sad because my first commit made it into
gnome-shell: "Fix missing semicolon in source title commit" I know, I'm
pretty amazing.
While that was a pretty small thing, my second patch also landed during
the last week, bringing icon buttons to the land of notifications. Gnome
shell's notification service now advertises a 'x-gnome-icon-buttons'
capability, so if you pass it actions with id's that match icons, you
get a pretty icon button. This brought up the question of symbolic icons
and I now have on my plate to implement a means of attempting to load
them in g-s. I miss working in C, so, that will be a nice break from the
rather unstructured world of javascript.

Since I'm most familiar with rhythmbox, I've been implementing things
that interact with it, and along those lines I've been working on a
patch for displaying background images in notifications. Part of working
on that ended up being working on a patch to change how rhythmbox sends
cover artwork and trying to make g-s's notification service's icon and
image handling follow the notification spec more closely.

I am also still trapped in xembed hell, trying to deal with status
icons, and making them play nicely in the message tray. They are
resisting me quite successfully, but, well, I'll keep trying.

Last but not least, I've found a programming rhythm. I'm starting to
develop habits of how many terminals I have open while coding, and my
git patterns (branch, add, commit, add, commit --amend, etc). That's
been pretty neat for me, since I haven't programmed this seriously
before outside of crystal lattice simulations.

'till next time,
 Matt

Blog post:
http://perditusinventusque.blogspot.com/2010/07/message-tray-week-5.html