No, I don’t have millions of worshippers. Yet.

…as evidenced by another happy (albeit bug-filing) deskbar user.

I haven’t done any work on the deskbar lately, because of exams. But they’re all over forever (really, not like the last time I finished uni). So hopefully, I’m back for some productive hacking (Civ4 not withstanding). Raphael has been holding the fort whilst I’ve been gone – just look at the sheer monotony of the authors in the ChangeLog.

In other GNOMEy news, I found out that, with Breezy’s menu editor, I can get a WinXP-esque Browser and E-mail icons being only two clicks away, rather than three. Two close clicks, too, unlike Windows.

Finally, an old uni buddy of mine found a pointer to a Quake3 capture-the-flag map that I made when I was seriously procrastinating from my honours thesis, in the year 2000. I’ll have to see if I can dig up the source from somewhere. Ringworld, as in the book by Larry Niven. Taonchon, as in Nigel TAO, Computer HONours student. Design philosophy: small and ‘cozy’, 2v2 or 3v3 max, weapons on the outside, flags on the inside, health down below, quad damage at the top. How did it play? A bit too quickly – you can regularly spawn and capture in under a minute.

Egosearching for “deskbar applet” comes back with blogs in funny languages:
German,
Spanish,
Italian.

Somebody on the GNOME Wiki just noticed that you can mouse-wheel over the workspace switcher applet to scroll through workspaces. This is a neato feature, and reminded me that I’ve been meaning to patch the window list and selector menu so that I can mouse-wheel instead of fumbling for the Alt-Tab key combo (and then guessing how the list has been re-ordered since my last Alt-Tab).

I cooked up a patch (whilst other people are feverishly hacking on the deskbar), then noticed that somebody had already filed one at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309956. D’oh!

So now I can scroll-wheel to do something Alt-Tab-esque. And I’ve re-arranged my two-panel set up into something experimental. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Big thing is that I’m down to only one (bottom) panel – so that I can get to the close button of my window as one of Fitt’s corners. Here’s what’s on the panel:

From left to right: window selector menu, workspace switcher, deskbar, notification area, volume control, weather applet, diskmount applet, system monitor, calendar. Everything I need, and in the two important corners: window selector (since I don’t have a space-hogging window list) and the clock (for calendar appointments).

What’s unusual is that there is no window list (what Microsoft Windows calls a “Taskbar”), and there’s no “Start” menu (which I wasn’t really using anyway, but it’s only a keybinding away – the “menu” key under the Right Shift, rather than Alt-F1 for me).

The experiment has been working for me for the last couple of days. Rather than using the window list, I slam my mouse into the bottom left corner (and maybe then flick my wrist a little to the right to get over the workspace switcher) and scroll.

It’s amazing (to me) how much the deskbar has grown once other people came in to help. I used to hack on it every other weekend or so, but now there’s CVS commits daily. And there’s these features (or lack of features) where I think, “I wouldn’t have done it like that, but, actually, that’s kind of neat”. Of course there’s also lots of “I had no idea how to do that”. Not the least of those are translations – so much for the New Year’s Resolution to be (at least a little) bi-lingual (sigh). All hail the open source pixie dust!

And speaking of other people, I only just saw a girl I went to Uni with on (Aussie) reality TV. And she’s kicking a.

Finally, before I forget, The CUEMIAC Widget = The CoolUberEnhancedMatrixImmersiveAlignedCairo Widget

… i.e., First Post.

So, what’s this all about? I’ve been using GNOME software for a few years now, lurked on the mailing lists for two, and in the past year actually posted a handful of times, and also wrote some software and shared it around. In particular, my Deskbar Applet has had a surge in popularity (admittedly from a low base 🙂 in the last month or two, probably helped by the screencast.

And, since e-mail is so 20th century, I’ve finally got a blog. And to start off, Deskbar Applet 0.6 has just been released.