Drewski   Coming soon in three dimensions

So I’ve cooked up a nice tooltip for the trayicon for Pygmy (in SVN r79), with the help of Gian Mario Tagliaretti. Basically, it’s a window that looks like a tooltip, smells and tastes like a tooltip, even behaves like a tooltip, but is not one. Here’s a peek at what they look like right now (tooltip is on the upper-right):

I guess it could look a little more like a tooltip, but it’s getting there.
Edit: r86 has corrected the look and improved the positioning. Thumbnail updated above.

So. Many updates with Pygmy lately. I rewrote the way it connects to MPD using a Singleton, so there’s only ever one, no matter if you change the port, open the browser, etc. Makes it all very stable. For example, (I haven’t written this capability yet) you’ll be able to update your music database and not have to close/reopen the browser window. Neat.

Decklin Foster also graced us with his presence (and code) this past weekend and he has already made some good improvements on my code. He also has some good ideas about what to do in the future. For example, he has started implementing a parsing engine using the empy system. I haven’t tried this out (or even heard of it before Decklin mentioned it), but I look forward to it. (As of now, Decklin has access to and will be patching our SVN tree. He also recommended we give the browser window a name, Bantu. I like this because that gives credence to the (eventual) fact that you can run the browser on its own.

All in all, it’s been a fun time. This project has increasingly been a learning experience in OSS development and as such, has been constantly humbling! Decklin’s patches, for example, have focused on cleaning up some of my badly organized code, which is a result of me learning how to do things as I’m implementing them. There are interesting ways of categorizing and classifying things; Python keeps on impressing me!

Look for a release in the next few days!

Lesson of the week: A blog is only as good as the posts you put therein. Of course, since a blog is more than the sum of its posts, …I don’t know what that means for me, but it’s good.

So Pygmy’s coming along. I just released the third version last weekend and am pleased with how it’s coming along. I’m rather surprised how much work it takes to get even a little app like this working. I’m beyond the stage where I needed to read a lot of documentation to learn how to code what I wanted to do (though the PyGTK reference is still quite the boon), but I’m still finding that there are a lot of things to account for. And as the program gets bigger (and harder to manage), I see the use for design patterns to effectively use my code. I’ll need to read up on those more, but there’s no time!

So I just started my new job this week. Computer application phone support, to be specific. This month is just training, but by September, I’ll be on the phones making people’s days… or something. It’s funny: I’m not really an Excel wizard, so my training has been illustrative in figuring out what you can really do with it. But it’s surprising, approaching an application like for the first time. I haven’t really had that experience in a while, but at this point, I notice a lot of UI quirks and awkward presentation of features. For example, you can “set print area” in the File menu, define a “range to print” in Page Setup, define a named range “Print_Area”, all of which do the same thing. Why not pick one option and stick to it? Layers automation and multiple options make the UI complicated and confusing. Anyway….