[Rhythmbox-devel] Additional areas where plugins can add UI

[John Iacona <plate0salad gmail com>]

I am the other Rhythmbox GSoCer and wanted to give an update on my
progress and get some feedback. I am working on the contextual
information panel (proposal is at
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~jiacona/soc/rhythmbox-proposal.pdf). The
first thing I ran into is that the plugin interface does not have
enough flexibility in where to add UI.

What I have done is made a new area available where widgets can be
added. The image at
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~jiacona/soc/plugin-right-sidebar.png shows
the existing areas (SHELL_UI_LOCATION_MAIN_BOTTOM,
SHELL_UI_LOCATION_MAIN_TOP, SHELL_UI_LOCATION_SIDEBAR) as well as the
new area -- SHELL_UI_LOCATION_RSIDEBAR. I have already added the
bindings and made it so that the right sidebar is only visible when it
has something in it. I am currently working on making the position
persistent (like the left sidebar).

What I was wondering is if anyone sees any value in extending the
flexibility of where UI can be added even more. As it is, add_widget()
can only append widgets to the bottom of an area. I was thinking that
it might be useful to be able to add widgets to the top or bottom of
an area. This is just something I thought of that might be useful that
would be pretty simple to implement while I am already tinkering
around in the area.

Regards,
John Iacona