Re: 2.3 Proposed Features

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Chipzz <chipzz ULYSSIS Org> writes:

> On 7 Feb 2003, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 
> > From: Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>
> > Subject: Re: 2.3 Proposed Features
> >
> > 	Well, really that has nothing to do with the panel itself. This is why
> > I hate the fact that applets are so straightforward to write - the world
> > and his mother write l33t new applets but no thought is given to making
> > them work well on really small panels or vertical panels. Each
> 
> Or on transparant panels...

My Hardware Monitor applet does respect panel size and orientation,
but not the background. The reason is that I don't know how to support
it properly. One can call panel_applet_get_background() and get back a
"no changes necessary", "use this color" and "use this pixmap", but
how do I cope with this?

Should I try to modify the background of each and every widget in my
applet, and how do I do that without stepping on the toes of the
current theme? And what about a using a canvas, how do I get a pixmap
inside that?

> > individual applet needs to be designed to handle these scenarios well -
> > and that's not an easy task for most applets.

I don't think the current situation is going to change unless the
documentation is augmented with a few examples of adapting the
background of ordinary GTK+ widgets and of the canvas. Or a better,
automagic scheme for changing the background is used; wouldn't it be
possible to simply set a custom theme for the panel and have all child
widgets/applets automatically inherit that?

Perhaps the problem with vertical panels and odd panel sizes could
also be helped if someone clueful wrote a few hints.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/