#99 Design proposal: Roxlets (NB: not a Filer patch)

[Fabien COUTANT]

Since many months I have been very disappointed by the
lack of portability of *desklets -- I mean
cross-desktop portability -- and very high memory
resource requirements.

OTOH I want a weather report display. I like XFCE's
panel applet but once again it depends on XFCE.

Both reasons decided me to design and write this little
program. The design is such that each applet produces
a thumbnail icon image, that will be displayed on the
pinboard or in a panel, and a full-size (more detailed)
image that gets displayed when you click on the icon.
Both thumbnail and full-size images are refreshed
regularly, preferably at a low frequency.

This design allows refreshes by a daemon (prefer
performance against memory) or by some shell script /
cron job (prefer light memory against performance).

Currently the program is in proof-of-concept state.
There's no documentation and I only wrote a weather
applet (battery and cpu applets are being worked on).
I make it available too see what people think about it
and get some feedback about the design, usability, or
extendability.

Usage:
1. edit your station code in applets/Weather/config.xml
(refers to www.weather.com)
2. ensure you're able to launch PNG images for viewing
from Rox-Filer.
3. DnD the Weather Rox application to your pinboard or
one of your panels
4. from a shell prompt, launch either "./main.py run"
for a bare refresh, or "./main.py server" for permanent
looping (ctrl-C to interrupt)

Requirements:
Python (>= 2.3 I would say)
an ElementTree implementation (preferably cElementTree)
PIL, the Python Imaging Library, with font support for
FreeType
fontconfig (command line tools)

[Fabien COUTANT]

roxlets-0.1-part1of3.tar.gz

[Fabien COUTANT]

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2nd part of 3

[Fabien COUTANT]

roxlets-0.1-part2of3.tar.gz

[Fabien COUTANT]

roxlets-0.1-part3of3.tar.gz

[Fabien COUTANT]

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part 3 of 3

[Thomas Leonard]

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I get:

[Errno 2] No such file or directory:
'applets/CpuTemp/AppInfo.xml'
-> ignore CpuTemp
[Errno 2] No such file or directory:
'applets/Battery/AppInfo.xml'
-> ignore Battery
Running RoxLets once
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./main.py", line 22, in ?
while service.run () :
File "/tmp/roxlets-0.1-part1of3/scheduler.py", line 45, in run
app.update ()
File "/tmp/roxlets-0.1-part1of3/applet.py", line 26, in update
fnList = self.instance.update ()
File "/tmp/roxlets-0.1-part1of3/appWeather.py", line 79,
in update
self.config.Units
File "/tmp/roxlets-0.1-part1of3/weather.py", line 90, in
WeatherChannelGet
WeatherChannelParse (ret, doc)
File "/tmp/roxlets-0.1-part1of3/weather.py", line 111, in
WeatherChannelParse
setlocale (LC_TIME, oldLocale)
File "/usr/lib/python2.3/locale.py", line 381, in setlocale
return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

[Fabien COUTANT]

roxlets-0.2-part1of2.tar.gz

[Fabien COUTANT]

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Here is new version 0.2; It should have this locale bug
corrected, and adds ACPI Battery and Cpu monitoring.
Part 1 of 2.

[Fabien COUTANT]

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Version 0.2, part 2 of 2.

[Fabien COUTANT]

roxlets-0.2-part2of2.tar.gz

[Fabien COUTANT]

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!!!!!!!!!!!
READ ME
!!!!!!!!!!!
v0.2 tarballs are missing a vital sub-directory.
After archive extraction, please go to the top-level
directory (the one that contains *.py files), and
run the command "mkdir -p run/fonts" from here.

If you don't, you will experience "No such file or
directory" errors at symlink time in _GetFont, and
no applet will ever work as expected.