GNOME Shell Extension for TheRockTrading.com

I’m growing an interest for cryptocurrencies, specially for Ethereum. I want to keep an eye on Ethereum value without logging in on the site. I want a simple number on the upper right corner of my screen, how hard can it be?

I use Ubuntu with GNOME so the first step is to go to the GNOME Shell Extension portal and look for documentation. I’m not lucky there but after a brief research I found-ish what I was looking for in the Gnome Wiki.

There’s a simple tutorial there with a nice utility to generate an extension’s template (gnome-shell-extension-tool). There are also some links to old documentation and a step-by-step tutorial which seems to be old too.

I’ve played a little bit with gnome-shell-extension-tool following the step-by-step tutorial but I was stuck between the old documentation and the feeling that I should study too much for a simple plugin.

Then digging a little more I’ve founded Argos which I realized was what I was looking for. Taken from it’s doc:

Argos is a GNOME Shell extension that turns executables’ standard output into panel dropdown menus

So after a couple hours trt_ethereum_info was ready. It’s a python script which do exactly what I want. That’s what it looks like:

There’s a little more work to do as it doesn’t work with python3 but my main purpose is achieved. Maybe I’ll add some other feature but it really depends on how much time I have to invest on it.

You can find more on github or on this blog.