"Office Hours" plugin for pidgin/purple - beta-ish + docs + VV.

[Kyrian]

Folks,

So, I saw the need to write a plugin for Pidgin that you can enable to 
automatically log you out of your accounts if you are listed as 'Away' 
and it's outside your configured 'Office Hours'.

eg. for if you use the same IM account at work as you do at home, as I do.

Yes, it's easy enough to sign up for another IM account, and yes it's a 
bit silly of people to be doing it that way, but people do, including 
me, so I wrote it. It's sort of beta level at the moment, and it's 
written in perl rather than C (although I guess I could write a C one if 
it helps?). It's been tested for basic functionality, but does need more 
testing on different days of the week etc, and I've written some other 
docs for it as well, including some curiosities about how pidgin's UI 
works, but that's no biggie.

It was simpler than I thought to get working, just a bit time-consuming 
testing more than anything once I remembered [with a bit of a Facepalm] 
I was using POSIX functions and thus had to include the POSIX perl 
module for them otherwise it wouldn't work. Oh, and I had a hell of a 
time finding explicit confirmation of whether the 'tick' duration for 
adding callbacks was in seconds or miliseconds, sources did not seem to 
agree, but eventually figured it as seconds more due to time and error 
than documentation. Perhaps that ought to be fixed by a suitable person 
(I forget if it was in Trac or not..?).

I do have a bit of a problem with making string type input boxes for 
hour and minute values work in the perl API for the preferences system. 
Any suggestions for 'best practise' greatly appreciated on that one. 
Currently I'm treating the input as a string (and yes I know that's a 
bit ill-advised if it's an integer value), but setting the input 
element's 'size' to 2 with $ppref->set_max_length(2) does not seem to do 
anything. Any suggestions on those points?

I guess the default answer of what to do next is to put it on the web 
somewhere and add a link to it here:

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins#DevelopmentofThird-PartyPlugins

I already have a Trac account, so that should be no problem I guess.

K.

PS. I also emailed Maiku directly to ask about API documentation for the 
new VV support in 3.6.1(?) as I'd like to try and get MSN Video working, 
and wondered if/where I could hook into that, but got no response yet, 
hence this addendum. Anyone?

-- 
Kev Green, aka Kyrian. E: kyrian@ore.org WWW: http://kyrian.ore.org/
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