New lens tutorial

Ivan Sagalaev maniac at softwaremaniacs.org
Wed Sep 26 23:51:29 UTC 2012


Hello everyone!

My name is Ivan, I'm a (mostly Python) developer recently interested in 
creating a new Unity lens. The Wikipedia lens tutorial[1] was my main 
inspiration but I ended up rewriting pretty much all of the code. I also 
wasn't completely happy with the tutorial itself so I decided to turn my 
lens into another one (I can elaborate on specifics if needed).

I have a few questions along the way. My code doesn't use 
python-unity-singlet to define a lens for a few reasons:

- The library is licensed under GPL and I didn't want to bind my readers 
to its controversies.

- The library currently has a bug that doesn't allow a lens to react on 
searches from the Dash home.

- I wanted my tutorial to be a little bit "closer to the metal" and 
overall I like the end result. However the library does a very good job 
at hiding the dark magic of dbus-related incantations. And when I say 
"dark" I really mean "negative-RGB-values-black". Googling around Gnome 
docs revealed only very differently looking stuff that I have a serious 
suspicion of being obsolete.

So my questions are:

- Where do I file a bug and submit a patch against python-unity-singlet?

- What to read (or whom to ask) about Gio.DBusProxy, Gio.BusType, 
new_sync, bus_get_sync, GLib.Variant and other scary things from run_lens?

Thanks!

[1]: 
http://developer.ubuntu.com/2012/04/how-to-create-a-wikipedia-unity-lens-for-ubuntu/



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