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libpng's man page makes a crap tutorial

tung's picture

If there were a competition for world's worst man page, libpng's would be right up there. Instead of individual man pages for each function and struct, it rolls everything into the one huge document. That would be acceptable if it gave descriptions for each of the functions, but it doesn't, instead providing an nigh-impenetrable wall of text which is borderline useless as a guide or a reference.

Misgivings aside, I've managed to extract the useful information for the simple loading of a PNG image and put it in the code sample below:

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Fixing window-picker-applet

tung's picture

As you're all too aware of, I own a netbook, and I run Arch Linux, so I'm always trying to optimise my experience by tweaking things here and there. One thing that caught my eye was the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface, which has 6 major parts:

  1. Desktop switcher - switches between netbook/desktop modes.
  2. Go Home applet - displays the desktop window, which is the launcher window under UNR.
  3. Human Netbook Theme - Ubuntu's infamous dirt-brown colour branding.
  4. Maximus - Maximises and optionally removes decorations from windows. Remembers settings.
  5. Ubuntu Netbook Remix Launcher - The main interface, displayed instead of the normal desktop.
  6. Window Picker Applet - An alternate window switcher that shows the full title of a maximised window, and the other windows as icons.

Being a power user, I wanted #4 and #6. I don't use Maximus, but I found I could get its effects from hacking my Metacity theme. Exactly how I'll leave for another time.

Instead, I did some work on Window Picker Applet. Here are the results, at the middle-top of the screen.

My tweaked version of Window Picker Applet in action.

If you're using Window Picker Applet now, you'll notice something is amiss: how can my notes be active, and yet my VIM terminal in the back still shows in the title bar? Try it now: open and maximise a window, and then open a smaller window in front of it.

The problem here is that Window Picker Applet 0.4.21 (I haven't tested later ones yet) assume that the front/active window is the only one that matters. Since I don't use Window Picker Applet with any of the other netbook remix stuff, this made working with multiple windows a bit irritating, as if people like me hadn't been accounted for.

I've written a fix for this.

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