(Continued from previous two posts)
If you’re familiar with the Avant Window Navigator, then you know that a
fair amount of the project revolves around eye candy and visual effects.
Making an applet that is consistent with the user’s expectations with
respect to visual effects (e.g., reflection, bouncing, rotating, etc.)
is very important. Fortunately, Neil and Co. have made this quite
straightforward. By simply sub-classing the awn.AppletSimple class, your
applet will inherit all of the special effects that it should.
Unfortunately, there’s one small trick you need to work around. If your applet is so simple that it just needs a single, static icon, then sub-classing awn.AppletSimple, followed by a call to set_icon, works great. It gets more difficult if you need to draw dynamic content in the area usually occupied by the icon.
The problem is that set_icon (as well as its misunderstood cousin, set_temp_icon) takes a Pixbuf as its input parameter. However, the drawing framework for doing just about anything, especially loading PNGs, is cairo. Cairo has no native support for converting a surface to a Pixbuf. I discovered a trick for doing this by looking at the source code for the PyClock and BlingSwitcher applets. Let’s say you have a Cairo image surface that you’ve created from an existing PNG, thusly:
cs = cairo.ImageSurface.create_from_png(iconName)
ct = cairo.Context(cs)
ct.set_source_surface(cs)
ct.paint()…and you want to get a Pixbuf from that image. The following function takes the surface, writes it to a PNG that is stored in a string, then uses the Pixbuf loader to load it from that PNG string:
# Stolen from diogodivision's "BlingSwitcher"
def get_pixbuf_from_surface(self, surface):
sio = StringIO()
surface.write_to_png(sio)
sio.seek()
loader = gtk.gdk.PixbufLoader()
loader.write(sio.getvalue())
loader.close()
return loader.get_pixbuf()Neat, huh? This is how I manage to display the temperature on the weather applet. I load up the icon into an ImageSurface, write the text on top of it by calling show_text, call the function above to convert the ImageSurface to a PixBuf, then call set_temp_icon using the new PixBuf.
You can see it in action by downloading the weather applet, and looking in weather.py. The relevant code is in the draw_current_conditions function.
