LinuxDev.net: Writing Gnome Panel Applets III: Advanced Features

[ Thanks to BeOpen
for this link. ]

“In this last article in the series “Writing GNOME Panel
Applets”, we will go through a few features that you, as an applet
developer, need to know. To begin with, you will learn how to
create sub-menus in the panel menu. We will not just implement
a sub-menu in our panel menu, but we will also create a feature
that makes use of it. Then, we will go through a feature called
session saving. Session saving makes it possible to save
information to file, so that it can be accessed between sessions.
Exactly how it can be used is up to your own imagination and need,
but our example may give you some ideas. In the last section of
this article, we’ll show you how to install an applet into the
GNOME environment so that users will be able to add your applet to
their panel.”

“Sub-menus can be used to arrange your menu items sensibly. If
you need to add many entries to the menu, this feature is
invaluable. In this section, we will go through an example of how a
sub-menu can be used. As usual, the example builds on the applet we
created in the first article of this series (the applet that adds
the text “BeOpen” to the panel).”

“What if you want the applet to remember your selected option,
and then start with that option as default? You won’t have to
re-select the option every time you start the applet. In our simple
example, this would mean that if you had selected the “True”
menu-item from the sub-menu, the applet would remember this even if
you terminated it and re-started it later. In a more complex
applet, with many options, this is actually very useful.”

Complete
Story