I have spent a total of 3 hours working on BillReminder these last 2 weeks! What can I say, sometimes you have to put your pet projects in the back burner while real life takes over. :/

One of the things that annoyed me was the old, cluttered preferences dialog. It was just too bulky and with too many things going on, specially with the ComboBox for selecting the prefered time for an alarm. It had entries for every hour in intervals of 30 minutes (i.e. 01:00, 01:30, 02:00, etc) for a huge, scroll off your screen list.

So I took it behind the shed and let it have it! I made some layout changes and replaced the ComboBox with a custom time widget with SpinButtons. It is not all I wanted it to be but I’m not as annoyed about it anymore.There are 2 other things I want to get done before releasing a newer version, but I’m not sure what my schedule will be like this week. :/

Today I took 30 minutes to package wbar (my local repository) and added it to an Openbox by default distro I’ve been working on. It feels very light and snappy, without any X compositing going on. I’ve also experienced with moving pypanel to the top but am not sure what to make out of it. I also experienced getting GDM to consider Openbox its default session and ended up having to make a few changes to Xsession to get it working. Ugly but worked.

I also had a major fight getting PulseAudio to start automatically. My approach was to drop a pulseaudio-openbox.desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart, which called a shell script to start PulseAudio… but apparently this will only work for session managers and Openbox doesn’t have one. I ended up having to change openbox-session script to make it work. Any insights would be appreciated.