After spending an additional 2 hours on Friday hitting my head against the the Great Dependency Wall, I gave up for the weekend and refused to touch the program. On Monday, I talked to my professor and said I was still having trouble with it, and he said he wasn't surprised. We then went back to his office and he explained what he had done in the meantime, which was actually rather ingenious. First, he set up a really basic makefile without any listed includes or libraries, just a compiling command. Then he used
make 2>&1 | head
to output stderr to stdout for head to recap it into useful dependency errors. Then he used the shell command
locate
to find them and add them to the include list. We ended up using the standard "pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0" libraries, and then ported it to my system with little trouble. After making sure all the needed #includes were present in my program, we made the file with no problem, and it ran fine. Just to double check it though, I uncommented my code that wasn't working due to dependency issues, which was to undecorate the window (take away the traditional "window" portion of it - title bar, menus, etc). Worked! So after about a half an hour more work I now have a working widget! Huzzah!
Now where to put it? There are 4 spots on the screen that a user can always locate, the 4 corners, so these are well used by operating systems and programs. One of the places that doesn't get used on Ubuntu or by most programs is the area directly above the taskbar, so I centered it roughly in the middle and threw it on there. Here are the results, plus MGMT and kitties.
What this looks like is the Songbird miniplayer mode on the bottom of my screen. But what it actually is is a widget containing the miniplayer that I can put anywhere, move anywhere, decorate however I want, etc. The real purpose of all this was to set it to keep_above(), meaning to stay on top of every other window, and to stick(), which means that it can't be moved and is present on every desktop. So no matter where I go, there's music. :)
That's super impressive! I stopped designing computer tasks when applescript became obsolete... Also TI-83. There are times I long for such power! lol... but seriously, awesome job there.
ReplyDelete1. MGMT=AWESOME, but when you add kitties to the mix they are amazing.
ReplyDelete2. I wish I had a better understanding of your CS speak. I told you that I understand a lot, but eventually it goes over my head. This is an over my head part.
3. That widget sounds sweeeet. You should tell me more about it. :)
@cybertyger
ReplyDeletewell...I just did. There's really nothing more to tell.
Well...I more meant how to get it.
ReplyDelete"no matter where I go, there's music." sweet!
ReplyDelete