John's Blog

It’s time for an update on this.

In my last article on this subject I mentioned a watchdog. I’ve been working on that but I took a wrong turn which slowed me down.

I mentioned I’d create a widget, put that widget on the computer’s task bar, and see what the network monitor was doing with just a glance. I’d click that widget to pause and ‘unpause’ my network monitor.

My wrong turn was this: My operating system comes with widgets right out of the tin, clocks and calculators and notepads and stuff like that. I can put those widgets on a taskbar or right on the desktop. I thought I’d just create a widget for my watchdog. It sounded that simple.

Well, I’m an old dog and creating widgets like those would be a new trick. Those widgets are written in yet another programming language. So I spent the better part of a day getting familiar with that language. I figured out the high-level stuff when suddenly it hit.

My eyes started glazing over and my head began to hurt. At the end of the day I decided that learning a new programming language just to create a widget was ’scope creep’ for my little project. There must be an easier way.

After thinking for a bit and doodling on paper I suddenly realized that “Yes, John, there is an easier way to create widgets like that. Hell. You yourself already created four of ‘em! It’s (almost) as simple as falling off a log! Hello?”

Here’s the four ‘widgets” I already created, every one workin’ just fine. From top to botton they are:

Volume Up - Click that icon and the volume increases by 2%.

The next icon is for, wait for it, volume down. I created the volume widgets because I got tired of dealing with a first-world problem. If I was mousing around my display and I wanted to change the volume I had three ways to do it. One: Reach under my computer monitor and turn the knob on the speaker thingy. That interrupted my workflow because I’d be slouching in my chair and I’d have to move my whole torso to reach the speaker thingy. All that just to adjust the volume. Can’t have that. Two: Lift an arm up to the keyboard and press the right button. That interrupted my workflow because I’d have to lift an arm and find the right keyboard button and besides, those buttons make a wicked loud click when pressed. Can’t have that. Three: Move my mouse around the screen and click stuff to get to the volume control utility and then slide the slider with the mouse. That interrupted my workflow and took too much time and… you guessed it… can’t have that.

What I wanted was an always-there one-mouse-click raise or lower the volume. Not too much to ask, right? So I created ‘em. When I click an icon the volume goes up or down by two percent (I found out that one percent isn’t enough). That’s the kind of workflow interruption I can have.

An icon. Always there. Does one thing. Just works.

The next icon is my “equalizer check‘. I click that bad boy and the software-based sound equalizer runs a quick check of three equalizer settings and then sets the eq to my favorite setting. Why do I need this? There’s been a few times that the equalizer didn’t load or it loaded and then latched up. One click fixes it. Works every time.

The last icon - the one that looks like a new moon? Ahhhh. Maybe you can guess correctly. Clicking that sends me the computer right to sleep. None of this “Are you sure you want the computer to take a nap?” business, or clicking here and there to reach the ‘go to sleep’ icon. One click.

Here’s the few lines of code for the volume down widget and the notification that pops up in the lower right corner of the screen.

So I’ll create a watchdog widget and a few icons to go with. My watchdog will use those icons to unobtrusively indicate what the network monitor is doing (or not doing). I’ll be able to click whatever icon happens to be displayed and pause the network monitor then and there. Click it again - unpaused. It shouldn’t take long to code because I’m quite familiar with the language. I think it’s gonna be neat. Stay tuned.