Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill » MTB

More housekeeping

Paul — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 13:06:55 +0000

Just a quick note to mention that I have now added a setup script to Macsen’s Transitioning Background. This is primarily about cleaning up the codebase a bit before I start tinkering with a Gnome 3 version – which will be coming at some point in the not too distant future.

Better help text with argparse

Paul — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:44:09 +0000

Way back in 2011, I built a small application to build a Transitioning Background XML which could then be fed into Gnome 2 so that I could distract myself with a constantly changing background. This worked well enough and achieved what I wanted – an easy way to rebuild the XML every time I wanted to add some more photos. It didn’t provide any help text, though, which is something I kept meaning to sort out.

And then Gnome 3 came along and everything changed.

I have now gotten around to looking at Macsen’s Transitioning Background again and have finally found the time to replace getopt with argparse. What that means in English is that if you type mtb -h, you will see this:

usage: mtb.py [-h] [-p PATH] [-s STATIC] [-t TRANSITION]

Create a transitioning background XML for Gnome 2

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PATH, --path PATH  Set path for images and XML
  -s STATIC, --static STATIC
                        Set static time in seconds
  -t TRANSITION, --transition TRANSITION
                        Set transiton time in seconds

As ever, all of the source can be found on GitHub.

Cleaning up some code

Paul — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:47:00 +0000

It was in the middle of last year that I implemented what I rather ambitiously referred to as a wallpaper switcher for Gnome 2. What Macsen’s Transitioning Background does is generate an XML file based on the images in a selected folder and then let the Gnome background switcher handle the rest.

With the switch to Gnome 3 this functionality is no longer supported. At least, not as far as I can tell.

I do still like the idea of using an XML file to control the background and have been toying with the idea of knocking together myself. As a first step towards this, I have tidied up some of the code.

The latest version of the source can be found on GitHub. The generated XML can be used to power a transitioning background in Gnome 2 and – if I ever find the time – I will start knocking together something that will work under Gnome 3.

Macsen’s Transitioning Background: An XML powered wallpaper switcher for Gnome 2

Paul — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:51:40 +0000

While on holiday last month, my four-year-old son got hold of my camera and started taking photos. Lots of photos, some of which were quite good. Being the proud father that I am, I decided I wanted my desktop background to rotate through some of these photos.

This is very easy to achieve with Gnome 2 – and is implemented in the Cosmos transitioning wallpaper. So on the Monday, I copied a bunch of resized photos into a folder under /usr/share/backgrounds, copied the XML file that powers Cosmos into the same folder, tweaked it, and was rather pleased to find my desktop wallpaper smoothly transitioning from one photo to the next.

On Tuesday, I added a few more photos and amended the XML file accordingly. By Wednesday, I was bored of manually editing the XML and started thinking about how best to automate this.

I have finally found a bit of time to do something about this and am now ready to release version 0.1 of Macsen’s Transitioning Background.

It’s probably not the most elegant solution (there is a lot of copying and pasting going on in the build() function) and the resulting XML file is not pretty. But it works.

You can find a tarball and some instructions on the MTB Project Page or browse the source at GitHub.