Spawn notifications with your program similar to KTorrent or ABRT

[PFeso1]

Hey guys. I have been dreaming for too long that I would program something to let me know for incoming stuff on the network based on my filters and such. I know there are already tools for this but I want to make one myself some day and a question have been bothering me since.

For example the torrent client "KTorrent" notifies you when a download is complete or whatever, it displays in the top right corner a message. Or another example is ABRT (Automatic Bug Reporting Tool). This "top right corner message" it's called "trayicon" based on the description I found here.

Example:
KTorrent:
ABRT: ABRT Notification

Do you have any idea how could I spawn a trayicon with details that I want like ABRT does when a crash occurs? Can you give me any example in C or Python?

Thank you.

[markkuk]

Each GUI toolkit (GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, ...) has its own way of creating tray icons. Search the documentation of your chosen toolkit.

[bepaald]

You will want to read up on dbus, it's the mechanism by which these messages are shown. Basically your system is (should be) running a dbus daemon, waiting to receive messages from applications, and your application should connect to this system message bus and send it a message.

And as markkuk said, different toolkits have different API's for connecting and sending messages to this system messagebus. I once wrote an application in Qt that did this, part of which I have quickly turned into a small example. Don't ask complicated questions though, it's really been to long for me to remember the details about this, but it works! Just extract, run 'make', and then run the app. (Of course, you'll need gcc-c++ and qt-devel (and possibly others) installed.)

bepaald