holiday hacking

it was a long weekend, as it always is at the beginning of august in canada when we have our "civic holiday". the idea is that we're not supposed to work or something. so i did my best not to, being a good canuck and all. at least i didn't work on sunday.

instead i went out for brunch with a friend and then to a pot luck with t. and the p-man. the pot luck dinner was great, as it was really just a segue into what is a regular meet up of a group of people involved in a communications and social change workshop here in calgary. it was the first time t had been to this particular group, but she apparently really enjoyed it. which was terrific as i'm not really used to having another adult around who is also into these things. usually my lovers find my interests intriguing by alien. hooray for change.

i woke up at the usual time today, did some dishes and then cooked up a nice lunch for all and we ate in the back yard. afterwards i hacked on kicker's new add applet dialog. i improved the keyboard navigation so that you can actually use the keyboard with the dialog (hooray for the antimouse) and generally cleaned it up.

then i remembered njaard saying that the most annoying thing with that dialog was that when you added something it was hard to notice where it was added and that a little visual cue would be nice. so now when you add an element to the panel using the add applet dialog a little tip box appears and moves from the entry you selected in add applet dialog to the location on the panel where it appears.

this draws the eye quite nicely from the dialog to the applet. as canllaith said on irc, "it's almost like the applet itself is bouncing out of the add applet dialog and jumping onto kicker". and if the panel you are adding items to is hidden, it unhides long enough for you to see the applet.

i've got a few more tweaks to do to it yet, but i like the concept. so kudo to njaard for the inspiration, canllaith for her usual faithful beta testing and my sponsor for letting me spend my days fretting over these kinds of details.

heck, i even worked on lyceum on saturday.