Came for the beer, stayed for the Freedom

So to continue with my “rewrite breadcrumbs a new way ever night this week”, I put one together last night using GtkCellRenderer’s instead of actual GtkWidget’s. I’m liking it a lot more. It uses a GtkListStore for storage. You pack cell renderers and work with attributes just like normal with other GtkCellLayout systems.

Now why am I making a breadcrumbs widget? Well, for Marina, I’d really like the movement between syndication articles and data sources to be easy to navigate. For example, lets look at this screenshot from the codebase in mercurial.

I’d really like to have the full breadcrumbs across the top, so you see one of two components at a time. When the selected breadcrumb is a source (Folder, Search, Syndication), the viewing area will show the list of articles in that source. When the selected breadcrumb is an article, you will see the article alone. This will hopefully solve my “too many things to see at once” issue with current rss readers.

So right now, you still see a GtkVPaned splitting the list and article view, that will go away soon.

So if you have any ideas for what you would like to see in a syndication reader, please leave me a comment. The core of the code base utilizes twisted and a fair mix of louie for a cross-platform eventing engine. It’s time to really focus on the UI and user interaction, which is not my forte.

Have I mentioned how incredibly badass Deferred’s are in twisted? Oh yes, I have.

I put together a neat little file-like wrapper for gnomevfs files in Python Twisted. With the combination of inlineCallbacks and yields re-entering with values, this can make life pretty nice.

You can grab the module here.

And a quick example of how to use it in twisted. Note that this requires Python2.5 for proper generator support.

from twisted.internet import defer
from gnomevfsfilelike import vfsopen

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def doSomething():
    stream = yield vfsopen('/tmp/blah', 'rw')
    data = yield stream.read()
    print 'I read:', data
    yield stream.write(data)
    print 'I wrote:', data
    yield stream.close()
    defer.returnValue('Success!')