Code walk-through desired

[James Simmons]

As many of you already know, I have written a couple of Activities 
called Read Etexts and View Slides.  For the most part they work pretty 
well, however they are written entirely in Python by someone who learned 
the language mostly by cutting and pasting code from other applications 
and reading articles found via The Google.  As someone who has 
programmed for a living for over thirty years (Java, C, COBOL, BAL), I 
have to wonder if I really know what I'm doing, or if there is a better 
way to do what I'm trying to do.  For instance, I wanted to show 
progress messages when a user is receiving a shared document, and to do 
that I needed to return control to the pygtk mainloop after each message 
so the screen could be redrawn.  What I did works just fine in View 
Slides, but the same exact code in Read Etexts just makes the Activity 
hang, so I commented it out.  Is it because Read Etexts uses 
multi-threading?  Or is what I'm doing just *wrong* and somehow I'm 
getting away with it in View Slides?

What I could really use, if any of you have the time and inclination to 
do it, is a code walkthrough.  If you look at my code and see something 
you don't like, tell me about it, and maybe point me to an article that 
will help me do it better.  You can find my code by looking at the 
Activities -- All page and following the links to my sugarlabs git 
repositories.

I'm thinking about adding an annotation and highlighting feature to Read 
Etexts.  I've described my ideas on that in the Read Etexts page in the 
wiki.  If anyone has suggestions on how I might implement those ideas in 
Python and pygtk please pass them along.

The members of this list have been extremely helpful in making these 
Activities as good as they have become.  Thanks,

James Simmons