HowTo: Pack Gtk CellRenderers vertically in a Gtk TreeView

[...]
var treeview = Gtk.TreeView();
var column = new Gtk.TreeViewColumn();

var cellrenderer_1 = Gtk.CellRendererPixbuf();
var cellrenderer_2 = Gtk.CellRendererText();

column.add_attribute(cellrenderer_1, "pixbuf", 0);
column.add_attribute(cellrenderer_2, "markup", 1);

(column.get_area() as Gtk.Orientable).set_orientation(Gtk.Orientation.VERTICAL);

column.pack_start(cellrenderer_1, false);
column.pack_start(cellrenderer_2, false);

treeview.append_column(column);
[...] 

Cairo Context/Surface to Gdk Pixbuf

Cairo Surface to Gdk Pixbuf

Gdk.pixbuf_get_from_surface(surface, 0, 0, surface.get_width(), surface.get_height());

Cairo Context to Gdk Pixbuf

Gdk.pixbuf_get_from_surface(context.get_target(), 0, 0, context.get_target().get_width(), context.get_target().get_height());

 

That is all…

Ubuntu 11.10 – Windows lose titlebar

Just a quick fix, if you find that all of your windows in Ubuntu lose their titlebar’s when maximised and want the previous behaviour back, just modify the gconf key that lives under:

/apps/metacity/general/show_maximized_titlebars

 

That is all

SlickPanel 0.02 Released!

Hi! After a long wait, SlickPanel 0.02 has been released.

The changes in this release include lots of bug fixes, but most of all the ability to configure your panel. While not all of this is completely finished (some things like changing the background of the panel and its orientation and not fully complete yet), the majority is.

To configure SlickPanel, all you have to do is run:

slickpanel-settings

And you will open the SlickPanel Settings application:

Remember that this is still early days and so SlickPanel is not what I would call stable yet However if you do want to try it out, check out the installation instructions here.

Development of SlickPanel : Configuration

I thought since it has been a while since I posted anything on SlickPanel, I would update you on what I am currently doing on it. At the moment I am both creating a configuration backend for SlickPanel and a program to configure it. To do this I am parsing an XML file (with libxml2) which looks something like this:

<slickpanel:settings> <slickpanel:panel > 

All of this code, which is both common to the actual panel, and the settings program is compiled into a static library so that I can call it from both applications.

The settings program itself will look something like this:

Of course all is coded in Vala and GTK3

LetMeRead : Google Reader

While I think the new Google Reader changes are miles better than the old Google Reader, like others, I think the chrome takes up too much space, and not enough room is allocated to the actual RSS items you are reading.

So I fired up Greasemonkey and created a userscript called LetMeRead that does two things:

1. Reduces padding on the top bars of Google Reader and adds a border to the right of the sidebar
2. Adds a Show/Hide button to toggle the visibility of the secondary bar (contains the subscribe button etc.)

Google Reader with LetMeRead installed and the toolbar hidden

Google Reader with LetMeRead installed and the toolbar showing

Google Reader without LetMeRead installed

It has been designed to integrate flawlessly into Google Reader itself and be as unobtrusive as possible. You can install it from its page on userscripts.org