Hola! On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 15:38 -0700, Jason Toffaletti wrote:
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.
Two things, a suggestion and an idea: 1) Porting your app to C might be fun, but is probably not worth the pain! C is not really a good language to write applications in... I'd just stick with python, and concentrate on making your app rock. In any case, it is not unconceivable that a python app be included in the Desktop release; the case would need to be made and so on, but most people do seem to consider python to be ‘not evil’ ;-) 2) OTOH, what you are doing could nicely be integrated into nautilus location entries (hit Ctrl-L on a nautilus window) and doing it there might be a more natural place. In fact, typing "www.gnome.org" in that dialog already does do something (probably not what I'd expect it to do...) The other stuff is not handled, but IMHO it would be a very good place to do that. Even the Firefox-like keywords sounds like a good idea (but trying not to make stuff look like url schemes (as in gg:whatever) because inventing new schemes is evil) If nautilus would pop up the dialog when the desktop is focused it'd be stellarly nice. -- m -- Mariano Suárez-Alvarez <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar> http://www.gnome.org/~mariano
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