adesklets 0.6.1 review
Downloadadesklets is an interactive Imlib2 console for the X Window system
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adesklets is an interactive Imlib2 console for the X Window system. adesklets project provides to scripted languages a clean and simple way to write great looking, mildly interactive desktop integrated graphic applets (aka "desklets").
Since this is 'a'desklets, others still have plenty of space to start similar projets, from 'b'desklets to 'z', excluding 'g', which is already taken.
Seriously though, all those packages are nice. Nevertheless, the first two have very heavy requirements in terms of library dependencies; basically, gDesklets requires a complete GNOME desktop to be installed (plus specialized libraries such as gnome-python, while SuperKaramba needs almost all of the KDE libraries and base environment.
This reflects on performance for the task at hand1. On the other hand, while GKrellM is significantly lighter (it still depends on GTK+ though), it does not deliver the same experience in terms of �eye-candiness� (to the author's taste, of course) or �scriptability� than the other two.
Thus, adesklets was born. It provides:
a minimal framework for X Window desklets seamlessly integrated into the desktop, with an easy to use central management for starting, positioning and stopping them.
a generic, rich and easy to use drawing API similar to gDesklets and SuperKaramba regarding its high visual quality, thanks to the Imlib2 library.
very limited library dependencies: uses the very good (and lightning fast) Imlib2 library for all graphic-related operations. No window toolkit used whatsoever; the program relies directly on xlib.
a light, robust and small interpreter potentially usable with all sorts of scripting languages thanks to a clean, limited and homogenous syntax. As on version 0.4.2, support for Python is provided out of the box. Future support for Perl and Ruby is planned. Feel free to contribute support for your favorite language!
Minimal disk space, memory footprint and CPU usage. Typically, on glibc 2.3.4 Linux 2.6 x86, a unique executable is less than 130 KB on disk, takes less than 3 MB of virtual memory per desklet right after initialization, and almost no processor cycles (including cycles from a Python interpreted script) when idle.
What's New in This Release:
This is a bugfix release.
It compiles without warnings on all gcc 4.x releases while retaining compatibility with all previous versions of the compiler.
A new test/timing.py framework was added to help diagnose potential timing issues.
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