dgoodwin's blog

It was particularly dark and overcast in Nova Scotia today, so much so that I found myself breaking out my dark GTK theme to make things a little easier on the eyes. I actually find light themes very unpleasant when it's dark or overcast, similarly for darker themes when the sun is shining.

Inspired by the new time of day background changing in Fedora 8, jbowes / mizmo / cswiii / zeus and I got to discussing a Gnome applet that would push the concept a little further and make the entire desktop easier on the eyes depending not just on the time of day, but also the weather.

Initially thinking something like this:

1. Configure and save your Gnome themes just as you do today, optionally including your desktop wallpaper.
2. Use applet to select a morning / afternoon / evening theme configured previously. Could hopefully use the theme preview images found in the newer Gnome Appearance dialog.
3. Use applet to select an additional overcast theme that would override the time of day theme if you were within the morning or afternoon.
4. Provide configurable times for morning / afternoon / evening.
5. Allow arbitrary commands to be run on time of day or weather changes.
6. Provide a quick drop-down to explicitly choose a specific setting (morning / afternoon / evening / overcast) and either keep it until the next time/weather change, or stop changing automatically until the user says so.

cswiii had the awesome idea to optionally get xsnow running when it's snowing outside. This raises the issue of whether the applet should support more than just overcast conditions, and also snowing seems like something you'd like to kick in even if it was in the evening, whereas overcast you wouldn't.

The whole thing would have to remain simple and quick to configure, it's probably not something you'd want to devolve into some bizarre overcomplicated rules system you can do anything with.

Have to see how Fedora is changing backgrounds at times of day currently, I recall it was an XML file that something must be reading in and monitoring for the time change. (not sure what component does that yet as I don't believe it's a Gnome feature) Might be better to just leverage this work, or have the applet store it's settings in this file.

Thoughts comments suggestions? Seems like it might be a slightly useful desktop bling addition, and relatively easy to get off the ground.

Noticed an upgrade to Openbox 3.4 in a yum update recently and I went to checkout the website and found a mountain of new features. For anyone who finds Metacity a little too simple and/or slow, Openbox makes a great configurable clean replacement. Same goes with KDE actually, and as of this release you should see Gnome/Openbox and KDE/Openbox listed in your gdm sessions menu, which makes the switch that much easier.

Some of the things on my mind lately:

• Rounder development was coming along nicely until I realized I wasn't properly understanding or planning for an asynchronous design. I was hoping to code infrastructure first and later integrate Twisted for the networking aspect. I started out with objects creating other objects (table creating a game or hand for instance) and passing control to it without blocking for it's termination. It quickly became apparent that this doesn't make any sense without a framework for event driven programming and I was headed for an infinitely growing stack of method calls that never returned as everything was happening in one thread. I've returned to studying Twisted and how it's best used, once I've got that mapped out work will resume.
• Ordered a copy of The Official Gnome 2 Developer's Guide that arrived today. Looking forward to delving into that.

I was browsing gnome-love bugs recently and saw something that caught my eye, a ticket asking for Texas Hold'em to be added to Aisleriot, a collection of solitaire games included with GNOME. It's been about 7 months since I cashed out my entire bankroll and left the world of on-line poker behind, but I can't say I don't still miss playing cards now and then and occasionally contemplate re-buying for another minimum amount and starting all over at those penny tables. Then I see something that reminds me of the frustration (Nova Scotia's government sponsored ads of the guy freaking out at his laptop tend to do the trick) before actually going through with it and thus far, I'm still poker free. Despite that I still do enjoy the occasional game with friends and having a no-stakes poker game available to me on the desktop sounds like fun, developing it sounds like even more fun.

I've been wandering aimlessly trying to come up with a project to hack on and keep running into brick walls or out of motivation. Having exhausted my ideas I figure I may as well spend some time trying to fix some gnome-love bugs and see where that leads me.

Fedora Core 6, Gnome 2.16, Openbox (although you can't really see it), Snowish icons, and Clearlooks-quicksilver GTK theme, which I can't seem to find a link to.