[Haskell-cafe] Rotating backdrop (aka learning Haskell)

[Yann Golanski]

To help me learn Haskell, I decided on a simple (AH!) problem: given a
list of images, display a random one as my desktop backdrop.  After some
time, change the image.  Simple?  

What I actually want to do is a little more specific: Read a list of
images (one per line) from a file.  Given that a working day is about 8
hours, I want to see all the images during the day.  So, the time
between changes should be (nbr_of_images) / (8 * 60 * 60) seconds.  Of
course, if the file changes (I add or remove any number of images) this
need to change and be recalculated.  Clearly, I want some interaction
with a pseudo-random number generator.

Because this is a learning exercise, I want to have a pretty GUI for
this.  Three buttons: Exit (which quits the application), Reset
(re-reads the file whether it changed or not) and Next (display the next
image).  Then I want a counter and a progress bar telling me when the
next change will occur. 

1- Get a list out of a file:  I managed to do that using the following:

parseImageFile :: FilePath -> IO [String]
parseImageFile file = do inpStr <- readFile file
                         return $ filter (/="") (breaks (=='\n') inpStr)

Nice, simple and I understand what it is doing.  

2- Get a random element from a list and remove it:  Okay, this I
understand less well.  I looked at the solutions of problems 23 and 20
in http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/99_questions so there is a
skeleton there.   However, my list is IO [String].... Hum, monads.

Any pointers as to how to do that?

3- Wait and do something later.... How, I have no idea how to do that!
Help?

4- I guess that progress bars and updating text will be somewhere in the
GUI (I chose wxHaskell)...  Again, no idea where.

5- How do you call an external program in Haskell?  Either xv or
Esetroot will do the job of displaying the image.  Is there a Haskell
native way to do that?

Once this is done and I have commented to the code, I will be happy to
put it onto the wiki as a teaching aid.

Thanks.

-- 
yann at kierun.org             -= H+ =-             www.kierun.org
   PGP:   009D 7287 C4A7 FD4F 1680  06E4 F751 7006 9DE2 6318
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