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

[Jason Toffaletti <jason subterrific net>]

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.

Thanks,
Jason T.