Re: Writing Gnome2 applets

[Martyn Russell <ginxd btopenworld com>]

James Kahn wrote:

> I hope I've got the right list for some help here - please refer me to
> the correct one if I'm wrong.
>
> I'm mostly pretty new to this gtk and gnome thing, but I learn things
> pretty quickly.  I'm trying to write a Gnome2 applet but it all seems
> completely different from the way that I read about for Gnome 1 here -
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/applet/index.html.
>
> I've downloaded the source for gnome-applets, but I'm confused as to how
> they are loaded. 
They are loaded by calling a macro which acts as main(argc,argv) and 
also calls gnome-init.
You can see an example of this here:
http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-applets/panel-menu/panel-menu.c


The macro called is:

PANEL_APPLET_BONOBO_FACTORY (/"OAFIID:GNOME_PanelMenuApplet_Factory"/,
                        PANEL_TYPE_APPLET,/
                        "PanelMenu-Applet-Factory"/,/
                        ""/,
                       applet_factory,
                       NULL)

or

PANEL_APPLET_BONOBO_SHLIB_FACTORY.

To see how this works, it is defined in /usr/include/panel-2.0/panel-applet.h

> If I type /usr/lib/gnome-applets/geyes_applet2 in a
> terminal, it fails to load, but it works fine by right clicking on the
> panel so obviously it's not loaded in a "conventional" sense.
>
> Are there any documents available that teach you what you need to know
> to build a gnome2 applet?  Or can someone write one if not? ;)  Any help
> appreciated here.
>  
The documentation is INCREDIBLY poor.  As far as I know the only 
documentation is the code itself for the new gnome2 applets.  The only 
other documentation is for gnome1 which is completely useless and unrelated.

> Thanks,
> James.
>
>  
I tried to get applets to work from my application WITHOUT using the 
macro which acts as a main(argc,argv) entry point for you application so 
that I could simply add an icon into the panel.  I was unsuccessfull and 
because the documentation is poor I didnt continue it.  If anyone 
manages to do this, post it here and/or let me know.

Regards,

Martyn