Our hearts with the people from Madrid

by Miguel de Icaza

Very sad news this morning; An outrageous attack on Madrid. Speechless.

Gnome Notifier

This is a quick hack that I put together in December 2002, a small notifier that looks like the Windows XP notifier with a nice little scrolling thingie. Someone asked me today about this hack, so am uploading it here.

The notifier embeds HTML with a few small tags that get displayed.

The nice trick back then was that you can send notifications to it by changing a Gconf key. You can then send notifications using the gconf api from your favorite language or from the command line language.

To use it today, do:

$ gnome-notifier &

Then to do notifications, you call a command line tool:

$ notify 'Hello World, to check your email <a href="http://....">click here</a>'

It supports a cute little prefix "run:", which does the obvious:

$ notify 'To run Xeyes <a href="run:xeyes">click here</a>'

notify is just a shell script that calls gconftool.

Ideally this would be incorporated in some form into the panel, and with a history mechanism, you could use that to replace things like Gaim's annoying notifications.

XAML

So someone has implemented a XAML-like stack for Windows.Forms. Just to be clear on the danger of XAML for the Linux desktop: it is not about the markup language being a problem: its about the fact that XAML developers would create XAML applications that are bound to the Avalon toolkit.

So it comes down to: No Avalon, no app.

Posted on 11 Mar 2004