[maemo-developers] How to create homescreen widgets from a separate process?

[From: Kristóf Timur]

Hi Kimmo,

Thank you very much for your answer.

It is good to know what the actual mechanism does, but so far I was unable 
to tell Hildon-Desktop to even care about my applets. Basically what I do is 
create a window and set the appropriate X properties to make it a homescreen 
applet. As far as I understand, Hildon-Desktop uses gconf keys to store the 
positions and stuff of the applets (the applets coming from hildon-home and 
the osso-abook-home-applet process also have gconf keys), but for reasons 
beyond my understanding, these gconf keys don't get created for my applets.

What I really need is a way to tell HD "Hey, start caring about these 
applets too!"
As far as I can see, creating a window and making it a homescreen widget is 
not enough to achieve this. Maybe manually setting the appropriate gconf 
keys would do the trick, but I'm not really sure about this either. Could 
you please give me some clues about what I should do?

Cheers,
Timur

-----Original Message----- 
From: HämäläinenKimmo
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 5:07 PM
To: extKristófTimur
Cc: maemo-developers at maemo.org
Subject: Re: How to create homescreen widgets from a separate process?

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 14:46 +0200, ext Kristóf Timur wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I have an interestion question. Been trying to figure it out for quite 
> some
> time now, with limited success so far.
> I would like to have a way of creating homescreen widgets from inside a
> separate (non hildon-home) process. (For example, by clicking on a button
> from inside an application, or something like this.)
> I was able to put together a solution which is able to do this, but as it
> turns out, it ultimately fails on some important things. It is able to
> restore the previous position of the homescreen widgets after a restart, 
> but
> it is ultimately flawed as it's unable to also restore the z-order of the
> widgets (the order in which the desktop widgets are stacked on top of each
> other).
>
> As I see it, the osso-abook-home-applet is able to do just what I want. It
> manages the contact widgets in its own process and is also able to 
> remember
> the exact homescreen position and z-order of these widgets correctly.
> So, I'm curious about how the osso-abook-home-applet is able to do this. 
> It
> is closed source so I can't look at its source code. I also think that
> libhildondesktop may hold the answers that I need, but unfortunately it is
> largely undocumented, so I can't really figure this one out on my own.

The Z ordering happens in hildon-desktop, see
hd_home_view_restack_applets() in
http://maemo.gitorious.org/fremantle-hildon-desktop/hildon-desktop/blobs/master/src/home/hd-home-view.c

It uses "modified time" to stack the most recent uppermost. That is
reset when ever tapping on an applet (see hd_home_view_applet_press()).

Perhaps if you look at the code, you can find a way to stack it up (e.g.
storing the modified time to GConf with your applet ID, or sending a
fake ButtonPress event).

-Kimmo

>
> If anyone has a clue about how to do this, I'd be more than happy if you
> guys could help me with this.
>
> Thanks,
> Timur Kristóf
> (Venemo)
>
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