Volume control

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sun Dec 11 21:55:42 2005.

Well, have a good time. It will be ready when you get back. I plan to upload the source to my site next week sometime to get some peer testing. I got the image buffering code in and now I am just adding a transparent background to increase the eye-candy appeal factor. 8) I created a toggling button state using the image blending methods to give the user persisted feedback as to what the volume strength.

It has been interesting to learn more about how adesklets works. I mostly work on Firefox extensions where the Gecko engine does the image buffering for me. I learned something doing it by hand and looking at the developer's examples.

By syfou (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Mon Dec 12 15:13:51 2005.

Hi Mark,

I had a look at your code; it is already pretty usable, but I have a couple of comments, classified by importance.

Important:

Your package does not follow the convention for directory naming (see the appendix on Submitting desklets in the documentation): the base directory should be name-version; also, I see you borrowed an older makefile from asimpleclock -- just use what I provide in the doc, it makes things easier.

Midly annoying:

The exception trace thrown when testing your desklet without having aumix installed is too cryptic to be understood without looking at the code... Some preliminary test of just a good old exception catching could be put in place -- believe me, some users will just not read your requirements, unless you stick them under their nose. ;-)
So you based your script around aumix; Why? It is not that aumix is a bad application, but it is not present "out of the box" on most systems, while amixer is (for alsa), and python support oss mixers by itself. In fact, it also supports alsa mixers with extensions module such as pyalsaaudio. Using python modules has two additional benefits: you do not fork yet another process every time you want to change the volume, that's merely a library call, and you don't have to parse anything yourself.

Not important, but worth mentioning:

Python is a dynamic language; why doing:

Code:


    # Python alas doesn't have a simple way to do this.
    def system_readline(self,cmdstr) :
        fp = os.popen(cmdstr)
        s = fp.readline()
        return s

when is is enough to do:

Code:


def system_readline(self, cmdstr): return os.popen(cmdstr).readline()

An about that:

Code:

Python is unbelievably bad at parsing integers! There's apparently no built-in way to pull 70 out of the string "70,".

There are plenty of ways, here is one:

Code:


int("70,".split(',')[0])

Just look to the re module if you want something more generic.

For the moment, everything graphical in your desklet is hard-coded, making it difficult to customize... But I guess it is just your first release, so it is not important for now.

Thanks for your work! Regards,

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Mon Dec 12 21:48:52 2005.

Thanks for the code review. In terms of using aumix I used it since it was the only python volume code I had on hand and I am not very familiar with the python libraries out there. I replaced it with amixer to make it more standard.

The current desklet is just a prototype to test out the idea of the basic design I had in my head. I will use your feedback to modify it as I continue to tighten up the code. I will look at using some of the python audio controls you mentioned. I would like to keep the dependencies low since I know most users will avoid installing them unless it is easy to do. I initially had some problems with the network and cpuload desklets since they had the pystatgrab dependency and I couldn't 'yum install' or 'apt get' it in an easy way for the Fedora. I am leary of adding in any other dependencies.

This is actually the first application I ever wrote in python coming from a Java, javascript, php background.

-mark

By syfou (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Tue Dec 13 02:29:08 2005.

Mark,

I am just leaving now, but I just wanted to say that for a first time with Python, this is very, very good. As promised, I added your site to the external links page. Do not hesitate to post your comments or questions -- I am not the only one who read them. ;-)

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sat Dec 17 22:43:08 2005: Volume desklet version 0.0.3.

Volume desklet version 0.0.3
o 4 themes included
o rollover animation on volume slider buttons
o 3 themes support desktop transparency

http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=desklets&content=c_desklets.php

-mark

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sat Jan 7 14:46:39 2006: volume desklet 0.0.7.

volume desklet 0.0.7 is ready:
+ Right-click theme change menu
+ 5 themes to choose from
+ no additional dependencies but Python

http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=desklets&content=c_desklets.php

By cs-cam (Desklet Author), on Sun Jan 8 03:23:22 2006.

Wow! Really nice desklet :lol:

EDIT: I made some changes to it, as it was the desklet wouldn't start outside of it's basedir because it couldn't find the images. I changed it so it'll use absolute paths to find the image and it'll dynamically update. For example, if I'm running the desklet and I use alsamixer to change my volume the desklet wouldn't reflect the changes. It will with this patch but I've just got it running Events.ready() every second, I'm sure if you wanted you could optimise that a lot if you wanted :)

http://www.camdaniel.com/media/code/volume-suggest.patch

Main index > About new desklets > Volume control

By SWAT (User), on Sat Oct 29 19:07:56 2005: Volume control.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sun Dec 11 16:30:32 2005: volume control desklet almost ready.

By syfou (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Sun Dec 11 19:22:13 2005.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sun Dec 11 21:55:42 2005.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Mon Dec 12 10:42:03 2005: working version of volume desklet running!.

By syfou (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Mon Dec 12 15:13:51 2005.

Code:

Code:

Code:

Code:

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Mon Dec 12 21:48:52 2005.

By syfou (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Tue Dec 13 02:29:08 2005.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Thu Dec 15 00:26:29 2005: volume desklet 0.0.1.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sat Dec 17 22:43:08 2005: Volume desklet version 0.0.3.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Mon Dec 19 08:58:10 2005.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sat Jan 7 14:46:39 2006: volume desklet 0.0.7.

By cs-cam (Desklet Author), on Sun Jan 8 03:23:22 2006.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sun Jan 8 11:09:25 2006.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Sun Jan 8 13:40:54 2006.

By gravedigga (User), on Tue Jan 17 08:12:16 2006.

By mbokil (Desklet Author), on Tue Jan 17 22:01:55 2006.

By gravedigga (User), on Wed Jan 18 01:19:20 2006.

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