Category: GNOME

  • gnome-keyring with Python

    The documentation on gnome-keyring I discovered helped me to access it successfully with Python. I’ve written a small module that fetches and stores a username and a password for some server. Some notes: The attributes are freeform, but there a some common attributes for network hosts. These are: “user”, “domain”, “server”, “object”, “protocol”, “authtype”, and “port”. Actually there is…

  • Documentation for libgnome-keyring

    I was trying to find documentation for libgnome-keyring for little project I am writing, which accesses a password-protected web service. Unfortunately there is no real documentation for it. No API documentation (well, there are a total of two functions documented), no tutorial. Finally I found this document in GNOME’s Subversion repository. Better then nothing, but why isn’t this…

  • Selection in GtkTextBuffer

    I’ve recently played around with GtkTextBuffer. It’s a rather nice text editing widget (or rather widget part). Unfortunately it misses one functionality, which is also missing from GtkEditable derived widgets: A signal for selection changes. There are two workarounds: You can setup a notification on the “has-selection” property like this: buffer.connect(“notify”, on_buffer_notify) def on_buffer_notify(buffer, prop): if prop.name ==…

  • Porting Tomboy from C# to C++

    Hubert Figuiere writes about porting Tomboy from C# to C++. I tried to leave a comment in his blog, but something doesn’t work, so here is my comment: Porting Tomboy from C# to C++ seems like a step back to me. C# is a higher level language than C++ and is much easier to write good and clean…

  • Google Summer of Code and Networked Tomboy

    My Google Summer of Code application, called Networked Tomboy was accepted. Just to quote myself: Tomboy is a note-taking application for the GNOME desktop. As such it is evolving as a replacement for the traditional ‘sticky notes’ applet and offers several advantages, including easy formatting and wiki-style links. But currently Tomboy notes are limited to the desktop. That means that users can’t…

  • Python Bindings for librsvg

    Background: I started to re-write the old GNOME Chess application in Python. GNOME Chess is still a Gtk+ 1.2 application and as its Debian maintainer I want a modern version in Debian. Of course the chess board should be drawn with Cairo and the chess pieces were supposed to be SVG graphics. After a little research I…

  • Activity Monitor

    The Problem Several applications need to know about user activity. This includes screen savers, RSI prevention tools like Workrave, and IM programs (for automatic away message). Currently each program has to implement activity tracking itself. This means that there is no unified configuration, but also that programs like movie players have to resort to hacks to…

  • ORBit 2.12.2-2

    Uploaded a new version of ORBit2 that fixes bug #317352. It seems that at some point ORBit2 stopped building the API documentation by default, so it wasn’t included in liborbit2-dev anymore. Fixed that by providing the –enable-gtk-doc configure option. But then the API documentation is in a really bad state. Also noticed that the linc-cleanup-sockets utility…

  • Thoughts on Notifications

    There has been much talk lately about notifications in GNOME. Here are my thoughts. Basically there are different kinds of notifications: Notifications that need attention soon. This includes things like notebook battery running low, a phone call, an IM chat request, or an appointment. Generally these kinds of notifications need to draw attention to themselves without being distracting.…

  • Blogging Application

    To teach myself C# I have written a little GNOME Blogger application for my custom built blog. This is a first test of it. Of course there’s lots of work still left to do. For example, it doesn’t automatically generate the actual HTML/RSS pages by calling the generation script. Also, I still have to do…