Ohmygosh.

That did it.

Thank you. Thank you.

I'm trying to make a 80x477 transparent .xpm image.

I went here, clicked the box on transparent, and made one then saved it as a .png file.
http://pixlr.com/editor/

I then took it here and converted it to .xpm.
http://www.convertmyimage.com/index.php

The image shows up black though on my tablet.

Did I do something wrong on this?

Here's the end result.
side.zip

Put that in a plain text file called whatever.xpm, there is your image.

Thanks.

I guess my idea won't work since the image is still black instead of transparent on the screen.

The image viewer displays its own background color and then the image is drawn over it. Transparency only works in contexts that support it such as icons placed over a background image.

What are you trying to do?

A big, invisible touch screen key on the right side of the screen using Xkbd.

Windows can't be transparent so xkbd is setting the background to black and then drawing your transparent image. A new window inherits the content below it and might appear transparent before you draw anything. Problem is that it doesn't continuously inherit that content so you only get an initial snapshot. It also picks up any content drawn over the window as well, so the right side of notifications would appear to stay on the screen after the left side disappears.

You'd have to write an app that opens a 1x1 pixel window and intercept all taps. Any taps on the left side would be passed through to windows below it and taps on the right side would invoke an action such as generating a key event and passing it through to the window below it. You can google for some sites that teach C and xlib programming, and make yourself a simple app in no time at all.

Oh please.

You know that I'm a complete computermatard.

Why did you think this thread has so many posts?

One thing that I would love to try and learn is how to hack something like flipcalendar.

It supports a transparent background.

With a few tweaks, instead of displaying the date, month and year, I could have it display the current song being played in Xmms right on the desktop.

If done right, I think that would be very elegant looking.

Care to teach me auouymous?

Isn't that a home applet? AFAIK, applets draw to the root window, they aren't transparent windows floating above it.

Just download the source code to a sample home applet from the maemo4 reference manual and add in some code to query xmmsctrl. Would be far easier than hacking it into an app that does something else.