Looking for mailwatch app

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:44:50 +0000 (UTC) Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2008-08-30, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:

> > I've almost got a shell script working that will automate the
> > process: it scans through all of the "mailwatch*.rc" files and
> > creates mail/nomail icons annotead with the mailbox names.
> > Next I need to add a sed command to put the new icon-names
> > back into the .rc files.
> 
> The shell script works nicely, but the result is pretty much a
> failure.  Each icon contains the mailbox name and is 120 pixels
> wide and 24 pixels tall.
> 
> There are two problems:
> 
>  1) Apparently a mailwatch "spot" in a panel has to be square?
>     Somebody is adding a large amount empty space above and
>     below each of the icons (regardless of whether the panel is
>     horizontal or vertical).

Yeah, I guess there's no real reason for this.  It should just scale
the icon to the height of the panel (or width, for people with vertical
panels), and maintain the aspect ratio.

>  2) I can't figure out how to stop the .png icons from being
>     scaled (they don't look as good scaled).  I made them a
>     particular size because that's the size I wanted them. I
>     suppose I could ditch ImageMagick as my icon generator and
>     find some way to generate an SVG icon with a command in a
>     shellscript.
> 
> The scaling thing is just an annoyance.  I can probably find a
> panel size such that the icons are scaled 1:1.  The square
> thing is sort of a showstopper.  It's just not usable if you
> have to have a 120x120 button if you want label text that's 100
> pixels wide and 18 pixels tall. :/

The problem is that getting icons the right size in the panel is a bit
harder than it should be, esp when the icon is inside a container (a
button, in this case).  The amount of padding between the image and the
edge of the panel is dependent on the gtk theme, among other things.
The panel will force plugins to be no larger than the size of the
panel, so if you calculate the icon size incorrectly in the plugin, you
get a chopped icon.  I don't quite remember, but I think the sizing in
the current release that you have is pretty awful -- it actually scales
the icon much smaller than it needs to be.  I've already fixed that,
but, as I've noted, it's been a very long time since the last release.

	-brian