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omarlenovo

gDesklets - GNOME Desktop Applets

Submitted by pycage on Sun, 2003-08-10 23:34. GNOME

gDesklets provides an advanced architecture for desktop applets - tiny
displays sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and
usefulness.
Populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather sensors,
news tickers... whatever you can imagine! Virtually anything is possible and
maybe even available some day.

Here are some screenshots to whet your appetite:

The system consists of three parts: the gDesklets core (a daemon running in
the background), the Sensors (providing data and processing user actions), and
the Displays (what you will see on the screen).
New Displays can be put together by simply composing widgets and Sensors in a
XML file. Advanced users may also create new Sensors easily.

As of now, Sensors are restricted to Python modules, but we are planning to
extend this to scripting languages like Perl and Ruby, and to C as well.

You can get gDesklets from:
www.pycage.de/software_gdesklets.html

Have fun!

Martin Grimme
Christian Meyer
Jesse Andrews

Re: gDesklets - GNOME Desktop Applets

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2003-08-12 03:02.

Why python?

Why not?

I have nothing against that language, but for something that resides in my memory and demands cpu power whenever I'm using it, I'd think of C instead of a higher level, runtime compilation language that requires more resources.

gDesklet's CPU load isn't that high. I've been testing it at my iBook running at 400 Mhz, and it really doesn't eat too much performance.

We didn't choose C/C++ because it's much easier in python to create a framework in quite a short time frame. Have a look at the code. My estimations are, if we had to rewrite gDesklets in C, it'd result in more code (about 2 times) compared to python.

Using SWIG (and/or the Python/C api), will allow us to write Sensors in C or C++.

cya,

chrisime

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