Recent hackings
Posted at 2006-01-29
A week ago, I thought about making an XMMS2 client that works like [strange-quark":http://quark.sunsite.dk. strange-quark sits in your desktop's system tray (sometimes wrongly called notification area) and pops up a context menu that offers basic Quark control.
So I hacked up "snett", based on ruby-gtk2. snett doesn't go into the system tray, because the freedesktop system tray spec says only transient windows should go there. Another reason is that there doesn't seem to be any system tray app that implements the balloon message feature correctly. This includes docker, trayer and peksystray. It's worth noting that trayer seems to be an ugly hack of fbpanel and its tray plugin (don't look at the code, it will hurt your eyes). Most of these trayer apps seem to be based on the tray manager code from libegg. Interesting enough, that code seems to implement the balloon message feature, but apparently it's buggy and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
So at the moment, snett just sits on your desktop as any other (borderless) window, but I think it should go into the panel/dock/wharf/slit.
Anyway, here's a preview version.
To run it, you'll have to apply this patch to ruby-gtk2, which fixes some really nice (read: silly) bugs :)