Re: the future of GNOME Applets

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Davyd Madeley">

> Battery Charge Monitor
> 	Needs a rewrite to use HAL, waiting for HAL to support
> 	batteries. Keep.

There's lots of dynamic hardware support stuff popping up in applet land at
the moment (just picking on this one as an example). It would be great to
have a simpler way to add/remove applets for both the user *and* the running
system, so much so that it becomes a "tick a checkbox" operation.

Ubuntu currently detects whether your computer is a laptop on package
install, and installs the appropriate defaults (wifi and battery applet)
based on that. It's a hack.

It would be ideal if applets could be added by the system as you set up
devices. Good examples are the wifi applet (though that problem will be
solved with NetworkManager most likely), the disk mount applets (adding one
when you have a removeable device plugged in), the mixer applet (only useful
if you have sound hardware), cpufreq, etc.

That requires single-tweak add/remove for applets, and ideally, this would
percolate up into the user interface. I commonly have the wifi, battery,
mixer, system monitor and cpufreq as "bonus" applets (the others are kind of
assumed), and it would be awesome if I could just pop up a dialogue, click
on a few checkboxes and they'd be there.

This will go some way towards repairing the confusing applet/launcher/panel
model we have atm. :-)

- Jeff

-- 
GNOME Boston Summit                                       October 9-11, 2004
 
    "It's a whole bunch of otherwise smart people just wandering around
    aimlessly in a mental vacuum with absolutely zero vision." - Craige
                                 McWhirter