Sezen in your panel aka GSoC report #6

As the reports themselves are quite boring for many people, I'll try to post on the blog more interesting stuff, so it will no longer be a direct copy of the message sent to gnome-soc-list. So let's give it a try...

People who read my reports know that lately I've been working on Sezen (if you haven't heard about this awesome piece of software using Zeitgeist go see a couple of videos at Seif's blog), where both Seif's python version and mine Vala version is receiving lots of love - Seif started to use Mikkel's FTS extension for the search, I didn't do this yet (as the FTS extension might not be installed), but I improved the search we had and now it's no longer that stupid (ie doesn't treat everything as exact phrase search, instead supports "quoted phrase search").

But as you could notice from the title of this post, we went further and tried to integrate sezen into gnome-panel via an applet, and this is how far I got:

At first Seif wanted to show the full sezen window also in the panel applet, but I wanted to try more "panely" look and feel and therefore went this way. Not to mention the challenge it was to get the Entry and the scrollable IconView widgets to work inside a menu (thank you Gtk for this unforgettable experience, you won a few battles, but I gotcha anyway).
If you're thinking now that it doesn't look as blingy as standalone Sezen I have to agree, but I still think that it has more integrated look with the rest of the panel and is already quite usable. I've been thinking where we could take this and I keep looking at this:

Wouldn't it be cool to have this kind of widget on your panel allowing you to start working with anything ZG knows about? What do you think?

For those who are interested, you can also read my official GSoC report #6.