Creating a ROX applet

This tutorial will show you how to create a simple ROX applet (a program that runs inside the panel). The applet will be a clock, so we'll also look at timed events.

You should have read the first tutorial.

Start with a normal application

It's good to be able to run applets in their own window too, and its very similar, so we'll start by creating a stand-alone clock application.
Create the application directory as before, and start with this code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import findrox; findrox.version(1, 9, 8)
import rox
from rox import g
import time
 
time_display = g.Label('')
def update_time():
        time_display.set_text(time.ctime())
update_time()
 
main = rox.Window()
main.add(time_display)
main.show_all()
 
rox.mainloop()

OK, that's pretty straighforward. A label in a window. To get the time to update we need to add a timeout. This takes the minimum time between calls (in ms) and a function to call. Add this just before entering the mainloop:

g.timeout_add(1000, update_time)

If you run this, you'll see that the time only updates once. update_time() needs to return True to get called again:

def update_time():
        time_display.set_text(time.ctime())
        return True

Making it an applet

Copy AppRun as AppletRun. Instead of creating a rox.Window, create a rox.applet.Applet, passing the first command-line argument:

import sys
from rox import applet
main = applet.Applet(sys.argv[1])

Make sure AppletRun is executable. And that's it!

When you click on the program, it runs it in a window using AppRun, but if you drag it to a panel then ROX-Filer runs AppletRun with the ID of a socket on the panel.

For a more complicated task you would put most of the code in a separate file (eg main.py) and get AppRun and AppletRun to import that, to save duplicating code.