Latest Deskbar-Applet development

This week I spend a lot of time working on Deskbar-Applet. First of all, I continued on implementing the Core functions. Now that the core was almost finished I started working on the GUI part. First of all, I designed interfaces for the view and the controller (according to MVC). I decided to get the Window UI working first. Additionally, it’s the UI that most likely will still be available in 2.20. It’s now possible to search and to select a result. In addition, I added completion for the entry, just to see how it would look like.

It took more time for me to adjust the match class in order to get pickling working without hacks. Therefore, I had to remove the reference to the handler it belongs to and the Pixbuf. The icon must be provided as a string now (e.g. a stock name or a filename). There’s still a problem with the Mozilla module, though. Sometimes it retrieves a filename and sometimes a Pixbuf. The handler is that complex and weird that I couldn’t find out how it works, yet.

Moreover, the changes I made on the match class involved changes on the history format. Instead of a pseudo timestamp a real one is used now. Actually, I’m not sure if the history thing really works, Sometimes Deskbar freezes on startup and the history file is reset, I have to investigate that. Finally, the awesome python module logging made it very easy to replace print statements with logging calls.

In the future the results should be ordered by priority and all query calls should be async. I gave the latter a try, but some weird things happened. I guess I have make sure that everything is thread-safe. I also want to bind the shortcut using gnome-control-center. In order to try that I need the newest GNOME development environment. So I gave Jhbuild a try and sticked to the Smoketesting guide. Compiling worked fine, but if I try to log in I get an error about bonobo complaining that the panel couldn’t be registered. I appreciate any help here.

If you’re brave and very interested can check out the Subversion repository.

I won’t have that much time next week, because an exam is coming closer.

P.S.: Thanks Raphael for answering all the questions I had last week.