So I was thinking it would be cool to have a revolving ticker of Craigslist items on my taskbar.
Since Ruby is my favorite language, I decided I would write my little application in that. So I went and checked out the Ruby GTK/Gnome bindings to figure out how to do it. I have to say that the documentation for the bindings is terrible (like there isn’t even auto-generated API documentation). And from what I can tell the Gnome applet API has been deprecated from the bindings. So I am not even sure there is a proper way to embed things in the Gnome panel using Ruby anymore.
However not to be detered, I proceeded along until I found the Gnome Swallower applet. The applet allows you to swallow arbitrary Gnome applications into your panel. Sweet, now I just had to write a Ruby GTK app which displayed the information in a normal window. Piece of cake (and there were even a sample to get me started).
So as a result of this work I present you, rss-applet-0.1 which rotates through an RSS feed titles and provides links to see the full article. For now I am not going to setup a project site, but you can checkout the git repository. Or clone it from here:
git clone http://github.com/mcolyer/rss-applet.git
And as always, patches are welcome. If you have a comment please leave it below.