Desktop apps developing: where to start

Question

Hi!
I wanna develop some nifty little helpers doing common daily stuff, like checking the up time of the internet connection and displaying it anywhere on the desktop or in the gnome-panel. that's just an example. a lot of this tasks can be done with cronjobs and bash-scripts, but for graphical stuff there's somethin' else needed.
The question: Where to start? I know, a forum search and googling brings up a lot of tutorials, but I even don't have a point where to start, which programming language is best for apps like this.
And no, I'm not looking for general programming tutorials.
Thanks in advice!

Answer 1

Well there's plethora of ways you can do build desktop apps. The language is mostly irrelevant nowadays, choose whichever you prefer, C, C++, C#, python, perl, tcl. You may start with deciding on language and possibly toolkint you would wish to use. Some hints, using C you have GTK as your primary toolking, then goes GNUstep thing, Xlib as an option if you need sort of hackish feeling, Motif if you have access to libraries and some ancient Unix system. If you would prefer C++, there's Qt (excellent documentation on http://doc.trolltech.com) and GTKmm.  I personally prefer Qt since it's easy, intuitive and is a base of KDE.
You may end up using python which, surprisingly,  seems to be preferred by most of people on the forums. If so then pygtk or pyqt is a must.
I would discourage from using horrid toolkits like wxWidgets, no fun at all.
Other thing for desktop apps would be inter-app communication and sharing common functionality, which is handled by Kparts & DCOP for KDE3, and (correct me if I'm wrong) bonobo - a CORBA-like thing for gnome (?).
For KDE these will be useful:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/
API reference
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/
Both Qt and GTKmm have nice tutorial which help you get started quite easily.
However if you would like to write conky like stuff, then unfortunately Xlib is the way:
http://www.tronche.com/gui/x/
Some common desktop standards (system tray, iccm window manager etc.) are provided here:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/