Easily Distracted

I just upgraded from 2.6.3 (using my “wp-upgrade” script), and It’s fantastic! Go watch a video about the biggest features. It even includes an “automatic upgrade!!” This pretty much deprecates my script, unless you want to maintain snapshots of each version. (I’m not sure if anyone other than me was using it to begin with… but anyhow….)

This is kind of a proof of concept I’ve been playing with. The idea is that finding a file within a folder is often easier by type, and you are often only interested in the most recently modified file. The problem with a file manager is that although you can easily sort by either type or modification time, you cannot filter your view of all the other files you’re not interested in. I previously wanted to address this issue within Nautilus, (and I still believe this functionality would be wonderful in Nautilus), but I ended up doing this much less ambitious applet as a proof of concept.

This applet will let you add any number of folders to it, and will try to categorize the files automatically and intelligently. Currently, it’s more automatic than intelligent as it just looks at the mime-type. Even so, I’ve found it especially useful for keeping track of all my downloads:

Steven is catching up on the latest on planet.gnome.org and has downloaded a couple screencasts demoing the latest and greatest. These files are typically 2-10 megabytes, so they didn’t download instantly. Steven continues reading and forgot about the screencasts until a couple hours later. At that time, he can simply click on the File List Applet, select Downloads, select Video, and look at the top of the list for the newest files. Steven is happy. When finished, he can follow the same process to delete them – without once opening his file manager and being assaulted with ALL the files in his Downloads folder.

Ultimately, I would like to extend the idea to provide the same type/subtype menu system for all files under all folders – a type of summary – but I have not implemented that yet. There are other features in the cooking pot, as well, but I have to get started on some “RL” tasks… like my resume.

Screencast

I had a problem recording audio, so I ended up typing as narration. Unfortunately, this makes the YouTube one pretty unwatchable, but you can give the “HQ” version a try.

• FileListAppletDemo.ogv (Original Quality, 1280×1024, 53MB)
• YouTube “HQ” vid

Download

No tarball yet as it’s still extremely rough.
Browse the source here.
Branch the source: bzr branch http://stevenbrown.ca/src/FileListApplet

Install

Update 2009/04/05: Updated install instructions here. (Some people don’t look at the comments….)

Installing will require some manual modifications.

1. First, make sure you have the following packages (Ubuntu): python-xdg, python-gnome2-desktop, python-gtk2, python-pyinotify
2. Then branch the source.
3. Adjust the FileListApplet.server file’s location to wherever you keep it.
4. Then copy FileListApplet.server to /usr/lib/bonobo/servers/.
5. Restart the bonobo-activation-server. killall bonobo-activation-server
6. Add it to the panel like other applets.

Update 2008/12/05: Added a couple screenshots.

Update 2008/11/18: Use xargs

Here’s a bash script that you can pipe output into and tell it to run a specific program with the output as arguments. I’ve named it open-with and placed it in my personal script directory: /home/steve/bin/. Look within the script at a couple of the examples for how to use it.

#!/bin/bash
 
PROG=`basename $0`
 
DESC="Read arguments from standard input and run a specified program
with them.  Meant to be used as output for a pipe."
 
 
USAGE="OUTPUT | $PROG \"PROGRAM-NAME [OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS]\""
 
EXAMPLES="
# List (with details), all the files that include \"downloads\" in their name:
  find /home/ -iname \"*downloads*\" | $PROG \"ls -l\"
 
# Queue all AVI files in current directory in vlc:
  ls *.avi | $PROG vlc
 
# View all time-related icons with eye-of-gnome:
  find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex \".*[^mul]time.*\" | open-with eog
"
 
function Usage() {
  echo "DESCRIPTION: $DESC" ; echo
  echo "USAGE: $USAGE" ; echo
  echo -n "EXAMPLES: $EXAMPLES"
}
 
# Quick check to see it's being called correctly, if not, print Usage and exit
if [ ${#@} -ne 1 ]
then
	Usage
	exit
fi
 
files=()						# empty array
while read -r					# read from stdin
do
	files+=( "$REPLY" )			# add result of read to array
done
 
# assume $1 is a valid program
$1 "${files[@]}"				# pass arguments to specified program

Motivation

You’re sitting at the command line and have a list of images (in different locations) that you would like to browse. Most image viewers let you iterate over a set of images, but only within the same directory. What would be great is if they accepted input from stdin through a pipe!

$ cat my_list_of_images | my_image_viewer

I didn’t find anything that did that, but using the open-with script, you can do something similar:

$ cat my_list_of_images | open-with my_image_viewer

Browsing a select list of images is actually kind of nice. It’s like a playlist for your image viewer – a viewlist. Anyway, I’m sure there’s some problems with this script. Feel free to provide suggestions in the comments. But I certainly don’t want to look at it for a while….

I hate shell scripting

With a passion. It’s not a great surprise… many programmers do. I’m willing to go on record and state that I hate it even more than PERL programming. I rarely do it, and when I decide to try something that seems like it would be simple, it turns out taking forever due mostly to quirks. The rest of this post is a bit about how I went about writing this script, which ended up being mostly given to me by some #bash gurus on IRC. And it’s a bit of a rant.

Although not many GUI programs seem to accept stdin as input, most accept filenames as arguments:

$ eog image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg "/home/steve/image seven.jpg"

So I figured I would just have to convert the list of images into an acceptable format: quoted, absolute filenames, separated by space. Doing this depends entirely on the format the list is currently in, but it’s likely a list of unquoted filenames separated by newlines:

/home/steve/image1.jpg
/home/steve/my images/wow.jpg
/tmp/anotherimage.png

For me, my test list looked like this:

/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png

I was looking for icons of clocks or representations of time, and I obtained that list using find:

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*"

So I can’t pipe it into my image viewer, but I can use the output as the command-line arguments if I change the newlines to spaces. find has an option for formatting the output which is perfect:

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" -printf "'%p' "
'/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png'

That’s great for me, because I’m using find. But not very useful if I’m not, so I wanted something more generic. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and again, I’m by no means a command-line guru. But here’s how I started:

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | sed -e 's/^/"/' | sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/" /; ta' | tr '\n' '"'

This wrapped the lines in double-quotes and join them together with a space in between. The find command is the same as before, minus the formatting because that’s what I was trying to find an alternative to. The output of find is piped into sed, which adds a " at the beginning of each line. This output is then sent to another sed which replaces the newline character at the end of each line with a closing double-quote and a space, joining all lines into a single line. Finally, that output is piped into tr which replaces the one remaining newline with a final double-quote.

If the files don’t include spaces or other troublesome characters (mine didn’t), then you could get away with simply changing the newlines into spaces. But again, I wanted something generic.

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | tr '\n' ' '

Anyway, now that we have something that creates the desired input, we just have to wrap it in back-ticks and put the whole mess as the argument to the image viewer! In my case, I’m using eye-of-gnome (or eog).

$ eog `find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | sed -e 's/^/"/' | sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/" /; ta' | tr '\n' '"'`

Wait a second. That doesn’t actually work. Why not? Running the backtick contents by itself seemed to produce the correct output. Copying this output verbatim as arguments to eog worked as expected. The problem was that when the quoted arguments were manually entered on the command-line, bash (silently) escapes the filenames, removing the quotes, adding backslashes before space,s etc. But when the pipeline is wrapped in backticks, the result is not escaped, and eog complains about not being able to find files that begin with quotes. Fine. I was not about to write a bash “escape” script – something like that should already exist, right? And it should be built in to bash! Perhaps it’s even called “escape“. Well, if there exists such a built-in, I couldn’t find it. But I had to be going about this the wrong way. Heading over to IRC, it was kind of difficult to explain the problem, but ferret eventually gave me the meat of the script above:

files=(); while read -r; do files+=( "$REPLY" ); done < <(find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*"); eog "${files[@]}"

It worked! I thanked him and began studying it. There were still a couple things I didn’t understand:

• Why two angle brackets with a space between them? I understand the first one is probably redirecting input, but I don’t understand that one next to the opening parenthesis.
  Answer: The <(command) actually puts command‘s output in a temporary file and produces that filename. So <(command) becomes tempfile. (Thanks, kojiro.)
• If I open some video or audio files in totem using open-with, there’s an odd delay. Using vlc doesn’t produce a delay, however.

And to think this was originally going to be a micro-blog post in Twitter and identi.ca. Wow. It’s safe to say I still hate shell scripting.

This plugin will display the View : Jump to Playing Song link as a button in the toolbar and/or as link in the Browser’s context menu. Other Rhythmbox plugins can be found here.

Screenshots

Using a future version of Rhythmbox – patch here – the menu item will appear in a plugin placeholder, above Properties. Otherwise, it will appear at the bottom, like previous versions.

From version 0.3, the Open Folder plugin will also be placed in the plugin placeholder.

Changes Since 0.2

Just a couple small changes since 0.2.

• Selecting the context menu option in the preferences will now display the link in PodcastView and PlaylistView popups, as well as BrowserView and QueuePlaylistView.
• Assuming the patch on bug 557152 is applied, this will place the context menu items in a plugin placeholder and allow the Preferences to remain the last menu item.
• Update (Nov 10 2008): Modified version of patch has been applied to RB development trunk, so the next version of Rhythmbox will have this update. Yay! Version 0.3.1 of jump-to-playing is to account for the modifications. Please use it.

Download

jump-to-playing-0.3.tar.gz jump-to-playing-0.3.1.tar.gz
Browse the Source: Here
Grab the Source: bzr branch "http://stevenbrown.ca/src/jump-to-playing/"

Installation

1. Extract the jump-to-playing folder into your ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/ directory. Completely replace any previous versions.
2. (Re)Start Rhythmbox and enable the plugin in Edit : Plugins.

Todo

From my previous post.

• the gconf keys in gconf-editor say they have no schema. The main plugins’ keys have a schema and don’t give a warning. Definitely not serious, though.
• it currently adds/removes the ui string when the options are toggled in the configure dialog. I have a feeling it might be better to only add/remove them in the activation/deactivation, and just hide/show here. Maybe faster?
• it currently hides the browser button in small display mode. That has nothing to do with the jump-to-playing button. That should be in core, if it was decided that was the desired behaviour.
• to hide the buttons in the small display, it checks the value at activation, and it connects to the View menu’s toggleButton’s “toggled” signal. So whenever it’s toggled, the gconf value for the small display mode is checked, but I think there’s a delay sometimes. Pushing Ctrl D quickly a few times may result in incorrect UI presented. I remember deciding that this is due to a delay set on the gconf callback to overcome some other bug….

All patches are welcome!

Update 2008/10/26: Added screenshot, descriptions to screenshots, and link to main plugin page.

Update 2008/11/10: Added link to version 0.3.1 and added description.

I haven’t looked at the plugin for a while, but I’ve been meaning to reproduce my “todo” list for it that I wrote on the rb-dev list a while back.

• the gconf keys in gconf-editor say they have no schema. The main plugins’ keys have a schema and don’t give a warning. Definitely not serious, though.
• it currently adds/removes the ui string when the options are toggled in the configure dialog. I have a feeling it might be better to only add/remove them in the activation/deactivation, and just hide/show here. Maybe faster?
• it currently hides the browser button in small display mode. That has nothing to do with the jump-to-playing button. That should be in core, if it was decided that was the desired behaviour.
• to hide the buttons in the small display, it checks the value at activation, and it connects to the View menu’s toggleButton’s “toggled” signal. So whenever it’s toggled, the gconf value for the small display mode is checked, but I think there’s a delay sometimes. Pushing Ctrl D quickly a few times may result in incorrect UI presented. I remember deciding that this is due to a delay set on the gconf callback to overcome some other bug….
• in the context menus, ‘Properties’ should really be the last item. They need a placeholder put in the UI core. UPDATE: I’ve filed a bug with a patch attached here. Jump-to-Playing and other plugins will need to be updated when the patch is applied. I’ve just done it on my local copy w/Rhythmbox HEAD…. Looks like this:
  

  Before (red) and After (green) applying the patch and using an updated plugin

• Show the context menu item in PodcastView and PlaylistView popups, as well. I’ve added this in my local copy, already. Maybe I should just bump the version and release….

This is based off of a Summer of Code application I made in 2007, titled “Intelligent Desktop.” Recent discussions have reminded me to at least blog about it. And given my current employment status, I have the time.

Note: You may also be interested in File List Applet .

Messy Desk

The desktop – this gigantic area of screen real-estate – is a mess. Some people use their desktop to dump random files that they’re working on, or have recently downloaded. Others work tirelessly to keep the pretty background picture visible with minimal icon clutter. Still others find the Desktop useless because it fills up with icons too easily. In the Nautilus Desktop (GNOME’s default), icons can get placed on top of one another either by a bug in placement or simply because there is no space left, which really deters from the usability. Personally, I clump different themed files/folders into the corners of my desktop. When a file is added to the desktop procedurally, there is no obvious place to put it and thus no obvious place to look for it. This is compounded if there is a “hole” in one of my “icon clumps,” in which case the hole may be filled with the new icon making it extremely difficult to locate by both file name and screen location. I recently gave up on having mounted drives displayed on the desktop. Anything dynamic fails miserably as their location changes each time, and sometimes they even end up overlapping other icons. In any case, it seems the desktop requires maintenance to work, when it really shouldn’t.

An Intelligent Desktop would overcome icon clutter automatically and intelligently. It would also be a starting point to looking at potential benefits of a more dynamic desktop view. I’ll explain what I mean by this in a second. This is NOT that silly little notification that your desktop has old/unused icons on it.

Automatically Sorted, Categorized, Updated and Easily Searched

The desktop is a useful place to dump files, but retrieving them is a pain. In fact, browsing the desktop for that particular file (or folder) is a pain without a lot of maintenance. My idea requires an always-visible, on-the-desktop set of UI elements that I will call the Desktop Action Window (DAW). The easiest way to think of the DAW is as a sidebar for the desktop. (Don’t stand up quite yet, sidebar haters.) But rather than the DAW being a collection of meta-information or unrelated widgets, think of it as a controller to the desktop view (formerly just a desktop). Performing actions on the desktop via the DAW simply creates a new view of the desktop. The original/default view that is customized by the user will always be available. If you think in terms of Model-View-Controller, the current desktop is essentially everything. With the DAW, the DAW becomes the controller, the desktop viewing area becomes the view, and the model is partially hidden. The DAW should allow easy management of multiple views of the desktop, some automatic (Images, Movies, Recently Modified), some static (Default, Custom).

And you shouldn’t be concerned about a sizable widget infringing on your carefully chosen background, there are ways around that: the DAW could be hidden when no mouse movement on the desktop occurs (like the controls of a photo slide show), it could be semi transparent until the mouse is over it, it’s location could be customized, etc.

Some quick ideas for different actions in the DAW include:

• An automatically generated list of types of files on the Desktop. Selecting one of them displays all icons of that type.
• A text entry for string pattern matching.
• Ability to easily hide all icons, except ‘always visible icons.’
• Ability to have custom views displaying only icons that user specifies.
• Ability to easily open file manager and display all files
• Some form of icon pager or scrollable desktop view to allow for arbitrary numbers of icons to be displayed per view.
• Ability to view and manipulate an arbitrary folder, such as Home, in the same way.

Mockups

This is where I stop the prose and leave you with a couple mockups. The “Overflow” view could probably be replaced with “New” or “Recent” for recently modified files. Anytime new files/folders/launchers have been added, the button could be flashing to grab the user’s attention. Better not to alter the default view at all, I think.

Update 2008/12/04: I’ve started implementing what I was thinking about with the automatic view filter as a GNOME panel applet. Check out File List Applet.