Unity vs. GNOME Shell: The Small Things – Status Tray

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:56:00 +0530

The GNOME Shell status tray is an interesting implementation written in JavaScript. Consequently, it is approachable to learn, write extensions for, and modify. However, one issue that bothered me was focus stealing.

When clicking on a status tray icon and moving the mouse cursor diagonally down toward the open menu, focus would inadvertently switch to the next adjacent tray icon. This was rather jarring, exacerbated by the gap between the panel icon and the popover menu.

Changing Brightness from GNOME Shell

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:23:00 +0530

gnome-power-manager was rewritten for GNOME 3.2 and merged directly into gnome-settings-daemon (g-s-d) as a plugin responsible for system power policy. Most power management is handled by UPower, with backlight brightness being a key exception. Backlight is managed at the session level by gnome-settings-daemon via its power plugin using XRandR or standard sysfs, depending on hardware and driver support.

To read screen brightness over D-Bus:

gdbus call --session \
 --dest org.gnome.SettingsDaemon \
 --object-path /org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/Power \
 --method org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen.GetPercentage

Why bother with this? On a tablet device (such as the WeTab), brightness settings were buried deep in system menus and cumbersome to reach. With the custom GNOME Shell brightness extension (download archive), you can adjust screen brightness directly from the top bar. This requires patching gnome-settings-daemon to emit the Changed signal (GNOME Bug 658493).

Gnome-Shell on Life

Unity vs. GNOME Shell: The Small Things – Status Tray

Changing Brightness from GNOME Shell