Notices

I have been playing around with the hildon desktop widget API and created something of limited utility: fat-label.

All this does is display some text you can specify. That's it! You can add as many as you'd like though. I find it useful to label desktops and whatnot.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Funny, might be useful.

Doh. One obvious bug: Does not retain the text across restarts.

Not sure how best to do that. I suppose using gconf?

Text file? It's much more easier and would probably save you a lot of headache hunting down potential quirks

I like using GConf as you can set defaults on install, sanely, using a schema file; and you can also watch keys for changes.

If, however, you like text files, GKeyFile is also nice.

I think gconf is the way to go for this. I think this would enable some other application ( like a script ) to modify the displayed text via gconf. Not sure what good this would do ( Not sure if anything fat-label does is useful haha ) but who knows! Better to use the functionality I'd get for free using gconf than not ;-)

Aight. I added support for retaining the set text via gconf. Might have to restart for the widget update to take effect.

All updates happen via gconf as well. So if you really wanted to you could modify the text in another application via gconf and the widget will update accordingly. EG:

Will update the first instance of fat-label to have the text foo. I'm not sure how best to communicate to the user what the instance ID is for a given instance of the widget. Till next update I suppose...

Oh. No support for retaining color yet. Or changing the size of the label for that matter.

...or you could just use the Desktop Command Execution (DCE) widget, with the command:
echo "your text"
:-)