Thursday, 12 April 2007

I'm away

After a day of work at the factory^Wfixing bugs, I committed some more plugin work to Totem. Philip Withnall wrote a Galago plugin, as featured in the screenie below. It will set your Gossip (with Peekaboo support), or Pidgin (with the gaim-galago plugin) as away when watching a film fullscreen.



I added support for sidebar plugins, which means people can get cranking at an IMDB cover sidebar, a DAAP browser for videos, or even a tagger for Beagle or Tracker.

Thanks to David Schleef, I got libtool to like me (and my uninstalled shared library). noinst_LTLIBRARIES wouldn't compile a .so, so my plugin loader couldn't find it. The trick is install-pluginLTLIBRARIES:. Thanks David.

PS: fonts don't work one bit in Blogger, so no fancy monospaced font for the bits of code...
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10 comments:

  1. Anonymouz12 April 2007 at 02:50

    Now all we need is xbox live style presense notification, so we can know when our friends come online while killing time :)

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  2. Anonymous12 April 2007 at 03:38

    I don't really like this. I don't think another big plugins dialog for users to fuck with is a real solution.

    It should just work. No options.

    Here's a suggestion. Say we have a central desktop wide idea of a user's presence, and a few settings we can expose. Totem should be able to say "full screen non-interactive task running". And lets say your normal desktop-wide IM idle time is ... 5 minutes. This time should just be bumped to 10 seconds while Totem is fullscreen.

    And that's it. You open totem, you full screen it, you walk away, you are almost instantly considered idle. If you full screen totem but are still jacking around with your mouse, you're not idle.

    The user doesn't have to know about this or care that this is even happening.

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  3. Orion12 April 2007 at 06:56

    Very nice work !

    I hope that we will be able to use a bookmark-plugin with that.

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  4. Anonymouz12 April 2007 at 07:15

    Gnome itself is often cited as being unable to be configured to the users requirements, we give the option then people get shirty, go figure.

    Jerome, I think that the problem in most applications is not that there should be "no configuration", but rather a question of sensible defaults for most situations, so users won't need to configure anything unless they have an itch to scratch.

    From how I see it, it sets your "I'm away" via galago, which can be honoured by any instant messager application. The "I'm away behavior" is then dictated by the instant messenger application.

    Just a heads up, galago is the "central desktop wide idea of a user's presence" that you speak of, check out http://www.galago-project.org/about.php.

    If your attempt to discuss this was a troll, it worked well, I took the bait.

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  5. Frej12 April 2007 at 08:06

    I might get a few comments if my status automaticly changes to:
    "Frej is know watching 'Random PORN title'"
    ;)

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  6. Anonymous12 April 2007 at 08:13

    Wrap <code>whatever</code> around the bits of code?

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  7. Simon Howard12 April 2007 at 09:09

    This seems backwards to me. Pidgin should be the one having the plugin - "set away status when viewing something fullscreen".

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  8. Philip12 April 2007 at 11:56

    Simon, that would introduce some form of polling rather than just having Totem tell Galago when it's fullscreen. The latter is more efficient. :-)

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  9. Anonymous12 April 2007 at 13:06

    So we need to write a plugin frame work, and then a plugin, for each application that can possibly go full screen?

    One plugin for Totem, one for Evince and one for Impress, one for GThumb, etc. etc.

    The window manager knows when an application has gone full screen and when there is no keyboard activity. Can't it send such a message so that the pressence status is set?

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  10. Philip15 April 2007 at 12:26

    GAIM at least already marks you as away (in Galago too) when there's no keyboard activity, and just because an application's running fullscreen doesn't necessarily mean you're away, so it has to be up to individual applications to tell Galago when you're away, as they're the only ones which know the conditions in which you can be considered away.

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