In between preparing to close on a house, getting a mortgage, getting an inspection, working on OpenThought, OpenPlugin, working late to roll out apps at work, going to four CPLUG and HPM meetings a month, and celebrating several birthdays, I've taken a real liking to the Perl Panel. Think GNOME Panel, without the GNOME part. And of course, it's written in Perl :-)

It's a panel which sits somewhere on your desktop, can run applets, and allows you to launch apps. It's not really at a point where one would want to use it every day, it has plenty of things that need to be done with it (and the version number makes this apparent, 0.0.4).

There's so much stuff that needs done, in fact, that it seems like the perfect group project for our Perl Mongers group. We've been looking for a group project for awhile that would accomodate varying experience levels. It's also possible to start off writing a very simply app, then to build upon it. The first thing I built for it was a battery monitor, which simply displays the battery status of a laptop in text. A next step would be figuring out how to change images on the fly, and have it show a nifty icon stating whether or not it's plugged in. If someone wanted to start out simple, some sort of system monitor, or weather monitor, would be a good way to learn the details of the interface. The Panel uses Gtk-perl, which is what I'm spending most of my time on. The Panel's interface is simple, it's Gtk's which is more of a pain to learn :-)

There has been some positive feedback from our group. The next step, once I get a grasp on how Gtk works, will be to explain some of that at a meeting.