I’ve recently switched from using Xfce as my main desktop environment to Cinnamon. There are pluses and minuses to each but, so far, I am enjoying Cinnamon quite a lot. I wanted to personalize my desktop a little bit, beyond just changing the theme, and thought that making an applet would be a fun way to do this.

My favorite website to view Halo statistics stopped working recently. So my idea was to create a tiny applet where I could view current arena rankings for any player. And so 'minihalostats' was born over this past weekend.

The Cinnamon applet tutorial is pretty bad, to say the least. Not only is it outdated, but the code given in the tutorial won’t even run! There are also no links to further documentation or any additional reading. I ended up learning mostly from looking at the code of other people’s applets. The Cinnamon Spices Github repo was an excellent source for this.

Even given the frustrating lack of documentation I enjoyed the process and even learned a little bit of Javascript.

Code for 'minihalostats' is up on my Github.