Hello planet gnome!
I thought I’d repost this entry now I’m on the big pgo and introduce myself along the way. So my name is Karl as you can obviously tell, I’ve been lurking around guadec and lug radio live the last couple of years and had a great time chatting to the gnomers (or gnomies, what is the accepted plural?) here and there, I’ve been on the outskirts of contribution for a while filing bugs and commenting here and there, hacking on the odd cool thing and slowly getting involved. My main project is wine-doors, which some of you may be aware of, wine-doors brings wine to the GNOME desktop in a sensible, user friendly way. Essentially we’re building a package manager for windows apps on GNOME.
After a long time of wanting to get involved with improving gnome system monitor I’ve finally been forced to bite the bullet and get seriously involved with the team. Largely as a result of this bug and being generally annoyed at the design and attitude of the individual contributing.
If you want to see what it’s like so far then check out this image
So now I have super-cow powers on gnome system monitor, what do I plan to do next? Well, this patch is just the first of a pair, the second which I’m working on as fast as I can is to introduce a new colour picker widget (GSMColorPicker) to replace the GtkColorPicker so we can have pretty pictures for the colour pickers like this.
This is about 90% done at the minute, just a couple of bugs and a bit of basic cairo code to go… I’m thinking of pulling this widget back into libsexier too, but expanding it a little. For the time being it is simply being designed to fit in gnome system monitor, be stable and cute and fulfil the requirement.
I’m also going to take a look at updating the default colours to match the new graph widget.
After this, I’m going to have a pop at a long standing bug I reported.
So all in all I’m planning on bringing a little zen to gnome-system-monitor… This all must be completed by 14/1/08 in order for me to get it into gnome 2.22 but this shouldn’t be too hard 
A little more about me, I’ve been using GNOME since I first tested it out at version 0.9 with redhat 5.2 (correct me if my reminiscence is a little out), I switched from afterstep and never looked back, over the years I’ve pretty much exclusively used GNOME, and watched the incredible improvements that everyone here has made over the last 10 years of GNOME, I’ve been grateful for every last one as my desktop now rocks!
Now I hope to make it rock a little more, along with the above GSM coolness I want to get involved in conduit and have done a few sketches of what I’d like to do with it, but the changes I’d like to make require some rethinking of the UI and an appropriate time to implement them needs to be found.
Lets hope I can make a few little corners of GNOME rock in my own little way
Welcome!
Im just going to plug my pet feature request….
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319682
Sparklines for GSM and the GSM panel applet !
Nice! Avoid pie charts though – they are harder to read (Always!).
(According to Edward Tufte… he seems to be right)
@John: I totally agree, if the patch is up to scratch I can get it in before 2.22 for sure, but otherwise it’ll take me a little more time.
@Frej: I assume you’re referring to http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00018S
However this is a pie with two values, used/free therefore it isn’t too bad! Pie charts are only really bad when representing information which should be usable in comparative analysis. For instance comparing the free of my system memory to the free swap space. This isn’t the kind of comparison anyone is really ever likely to make.
Welcome!!!!
now I’m gonna pitch my feature request too
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367162
What about moving the “caption” (processor numbers, colorpickers) to the left of the graph, saving vertical screenspace?
————————-
| | [ ] CPU 1
| |
| | [ ] CPU 2
————————–
You obviously though about it – sorry about that
I don’t think it’s a good idea to move away from GtkColorButton. These buttons are a standard widget that the user knows and expects here. The color pickers in your mockup don’t even vaguely look as if they could be clicked.
If GtkColorButton is too large, then why don’t you just reduce the inner border? That should be as simple as setting the “inner-border” style property. You will get smaller buttons that still are clearly recognizable as clickable buttons and you avoid duplicating lots of code. There is really a lot that you can get wrong (like keyboard navigation and themability) if you are doing your own widgets. You should try to avoid that by all needs.
I wrote a simple Tango based colour picker for embedded devices. Dunno if this is could be extended or reused for what you want.
Code is at http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/misc/trunk/libowl/libowl/
As per comments #15 and #31 in bug #328101, why do we need colour pickers there? I can’t see why people should need to change the colours; it should be done by their theme. Adding pie charts is good, but unless there’s some reason I’m missing, I would remove the ability to pick the colours yourself, and just get them from the theme.
First of all, congratulation and good luck. But… it is very hard to find the main page of the System Monitor project. Where is it? I would like to help somehow this very useful project.
. Because I didn’t knew about it for some time and I just found it, now after I finished the work where I needed it 
.
Also, could you please have “Memory” informational field displayed by default