Re: GSOC 2008 advice

[Benjamin Gramlich <benjamin gramlich gmail com>]

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far. Spending a summer
hacking Gnome is going to be splendid. 

About 4 months ago (I think it was October), there was a discussion here
about the panel. I was directed to desrt's work, but it doesn't seem to
be complete. I think a rethink of the panel would be a great idea. Both
John and Luis brought up the idea of widgets/gadgets/gidgets. This is
definitely an idea that Gnome should implement. Personally, I think it
would be neat to develop an interface for gadgets so that they could be
deployed to the desktop as gadgets, but then dragged to the panel to
function as applets. I also think that the current iteration of the
panel is a little stale. While there doesn't seem to be any agreement as
to how to design a new panel, I feel we should try to move in that
direction.  AWN is designed well, but it requires a composited
environment. This is problematic for people with older PCs and everyone
with an ATI card :). I propose a hybrid between the traditional panel
and a dock. The menu should also be modernized. Vista's menu has a fixed
size by default, and thus requires a scrolled window once the menu
becomes to large (this is bad), but it has two panes (one for the
program menu and one with shortcuts to file locations) and a search box
(these are good!). The gnome menu would benefit from these two
additions. (It could also look prettier, like openSUSE's menu).

I know I'm all over the place here, I'm just trying to brain storm and
start a discussion. The last discussion about the panel fizzled out some
time ago.

I know that Vincent wants to completely remove the bonobo dependency
from the panel/applet-library, but on the roadmap he also mentioned a
compatibility layer for old bonobo based applets. If the gnome default
applets were re-written could we proceed with an API break in order to
implement something new?

Looking forward to it,

Benjamin