Arch Linux

augustl

Member

Registered: 2010-02-22

Posts: 33

Programming my own notifications - looking for tips and pointers

I would like to program my own notifications. This is what I would like to end up with:

* When I have an unread message in Pidgin, I want to have a green 10x10 square in the bottom left of my screen
* Similarly, a new IRC ping should have a 10x10 blue square. A new mail could be a red square. And so on.
* When I'm on battery, I want to show the current battery percentage in the bottom left of my screen.

I expect to have to make a core daemon of sorts that a pidgin plugin and other subsystems can talk to to show these notifications.

Any handy pointers on how I can implement these kinds of notifications?

Mr.Elendig

#archlinux@freenode channel op

From: The intertubes

Registered: 2004-11-07

Posts: 4,094

Re: Programming my own notifications - looking for tips and pointers

Register and listen for notifications sent over dbus, like every other notification daemon out there. Inspect the sender of the message to determine what kind of popup to spawn.

The battery indicator would proably be better off as it's own app.

Edit: udev -> dbus. Dysfunctional brain/finger interface is dysfucntional.

Last edited by Mr.Elendig (2010-04-27 22:51:43)

---

Evil #archlinux@libera.chat channel op and general support dude.
. files on github, Screenshots, Random pics and the rest

Vintendo

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2008-04-21

Posts: 375

Website

Re: Programming my own notifications - looking for tips and pointers

I though D-Bus was created for interprocess communication and it so it would be right for a program like this but I havent touch that yet so I could be entirely wrong.

---

www.vincentkriek.nl

Cyrusm

Member

From: Bozeman, MT

Registered: 2007-11-15

Posts: 1,053

Re: Programming my own notifications - looking for tips and pointers

Normally I would make a bad malloc joke here (handy pointers ha ha ha), but I think I'll behave today.

I think the easiest way to go about implementing something like this may be with conky (it will definitely do battery, and you could probably find a way to get it to do the other two as well)

It wouldn't be writing your own program, but hey, why reinvent the wheel?

---

Hofstadter's Law:
           It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.