[maemo-developers] desktop/home plugins 2nd round

[From: Johan Bilien]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008, Collin R. Mulliner wrote:
> ok maybe it was not obvious but I'm kind of stuck with home applet
> development/debugging. So here some questions:
> 
> 1) Are home plugins supposed to work in scratchbox/Xephyr? If yes, is 
>    there a trick?

You need a recent version of Xephyr, with version 0.4 of the composite
extenstion if I remember right. Ubuntu Gutsy should be alright.

If you don't have access to a recent Xephyr you can disable Composite by
starting adding -extension Composite to the Xephyr command line, home
will revert to its non-composited behavior (but you will not be able to
test transparency).
 
> 2) Has anybody written a home plugin for Maemo 4.x and has published 
>    the source?

I have a simple example which shows how to draw a translucent applet.
It's been in the (long) queue for our release approval in our internal
machinary for quite some time, I'll push again tomorrow. There is also a
statusbar plugin.

> 3) Is there any better documentation/howto for home plugins then the 
>    one in the wiki, because it somehow is not very complete? Looking at 
>    the webshortcut plugin I see some stuff not mentioned in the howto.

Check
http://maemo.org/api_refs/4.0/libhildondesktop/HildonDesktopHomeItem.html
for the API reference on the widget you need to derive from.

Hth,
-- 
Johan Bilien
<jobi at via.ecp.fr>