[4997] in testers
Applets, feedback
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Sun Jul 15 10:06:53 2001
Message-Id: <200107151406.KAA03630@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 10:06:43 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
As promised, the applets which should be removed from the panel
(right-click) menu are:
- Network/Mailcheck
- Utility/Printer Applet
- Monitors/Stripchart (appears only under Linux)
I also noticed that you can use "Add to panel / Swallowed app" to say,
embed an (output only) xterm in your panel. It's easy to trivially
exploit this feature to make the magical "display a message on the
panel when the user starts something from the menus" feedback method
happen.
A quick kludgy demo:
1. Right-click on the panel menu.
2. Select Add to panel / Swallowed app...
3. Fill in
Title: feedterm
Command: touch /tmp/$USER.feedterm.$DISPLAY; rxvt -title feedterm -e tail -f /tmp/$USER.feedterm.$DISPLAY
Width: 250
4. attach beland
You can now use commands like:
perl /mit/beland/Public/message "Starting gnome-terminal..."; gnome-terminal&
...and the message will show up in the swallowed app. The user cannot
change the size of the app without difficulty. A special script could
perhaps be whipped up to add this to the user's panel if they have
removed it.
The contents of /mit/beland/Public/message:
---
$date = `date +%H:%M`;
chomp($date);
$user = $ENV{"USER"};
$display = $ENV{"DISPLAY"};
open (FEED, ">>/tmp/${user}.feedterm.${display}");
print FEED "\n".$date.": ".$ARGV[0];
close (FEED);
---
I'm sure something just as functional can be whipped up in a minute or
two using something considerably less weighty than Perl. There might
also be a better way than a tmpfile, but hey, delete it on logout,
maybe even truncate it once in a while, and it's not half bad.
Anyway, there you have a proof of concept.
Beland
Master of the Two-Second Kludge
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
The Talk of MIT ** http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html
===============================================================
