I spent some more time over the weekend working on Hello Unity. If you haven’t already, be sure to read my first post about it. In short, Hello Unity is a showcase application that demonstrates all the different ways an application developer can integrate their app with the Unity desktop.
The current version of Hello Unity sports a new syntax-highlighted code display, which makes it much easier to read and understand what the code is doing. I also spent a significant amount of time going through and heavily commenting the code to explain what everything was doing.
In the Launcher section I added support for setting the “urgent” status of the application. In Unity, this will cause the application’s icon in the Launcher to shake and, if the Launcher is set to auto-hide, will also cause the icon to slide out into view while it shakes. This is a very useful way of telling a user that your application needs their attention.
A new section was added for integrating with the Message Menu. It automatically adds a Hello Unity section to the menu, and allows you to add count indicators to it. Clicking on an item in the menu will execute the code for removing it. All of this is explicitly commented on in the source code.
Another new section is for Notifications. While it uses the generic libnotify API, it does highlight how to use it with Ubuntu’s Notify-OSD display system, including how to updated and append text to the currently displayed notification.
Once again, if you are interested in contributing to this project, you can get the code from the Launchpad project page. Also available there are source tarballs and installable .DEB files.