This week, as with any learning experience, I've really learned how little I know. As I mentioned last, week, I've moved non system status icons down into the message tray in my local branch and I've been trying to rework the system around that. This brought quite a few design points forward including. The message tray, as it is, was not really designed around the icons being important objects, they don't have a real way of keeping track of which notifications are theirs, and most of the management code for notifications and sources is in the message tray object itself. What this means for me, is that I need to revamp how sources and the message tray interact.

It's also posed a number of smaller problems that push my limits. In one case, I have to try and get accurate hover information from an object that contains an xwindow (the status icon). So I get hover signals from the box the window is in, and the window itself. It takes me back to electronics (I'm a physicist, not a computer scientist) and I'm trying to implement a switch debouncer at the moment to solve the problem.

I really don't have much to show for this week, between being sick and spending a lot of time writing notes to myself about how to redesign things. This past week and the next are finals here, so I've been a little busy with that too. Once most of my classes stop this week, I hope I'll have time to work on things during the weekdays, when most of the helpful inhabitants of #gnome-shell are around.

I would add, though, that while I don't have anything really new to show, I have learned that in most cases it's best to just jump in and write something that you think might work, rather than labor over not being sure how to do something. Half the time it at least partially works and you figure out how to move forward.