Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0



On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 14:34 +0200, Sebastian Pölsterl wrote:

> I think it would be a big mistake to omit applets in the new gnome desktop
> evolution.

why?

we've been changing the platform gradually over the years, mostly by
deprecating stuff and including new functionality. nevertheless, I
haven't heard a single justification for the continued existence of
"applets".

what do applets provide, nowadays, and are they even remotely useful?
what can deskbar-applet provide that cannot be implemented with
something that does not sit inside a 24x24 icon on the most valued piece
of screen real estate? isn't a gnome-do approach equivalent to the
deskbar-applet? why tomboy-applet is so special? it's basically a
launcher with a custom context menu. also, starting up deskbar-applet
*and* tomboy as applets on my panel causes my desktop more to start up
on login; not great turn ons, especially when there are developers out
there trying to get the boot-to-UI process down in the seconds range.

any default GNOME installation on basically every modern distribution
comes with:

  - menu applet
  - notification area
  - clock (+ weather)
  - audio volume applet
  - window list applet

and not only I have yet to see any regular user change the contents of
the panel (because it's mostly undiscoverable and because most people
*just don't care*) but I also haven't heard any justification for
allowing this in the first place. gnome-shell moves away from the menu
and the window list applets; it embeds the notification area and the
clock; and the volume is now becoming a notification area icon since
basically everyone has media keys on their keyboard and don't need an
on-screen slider anymore.

yes, it was all good with GNOME 1.x, but even for 2.x the amount of
applets has been steadily decreasing - also because writing an applet is
not trivial (as it involves dealing with some of the most obscure and
less documented parts of our development platform). people have been
abusing the system notification area with all sorts of crap (beagle,
tomboy, etc.) because writing an applet is *boring* (server files
anyone?) and *hard* (weird build changes, hard to debug uses, completely
different APIs for handling the menus), and it really doesn't provide
you with much functionality (wow, an icon and a context menu!).

so, please: saying "it would be a mistake" without providing reasons why
it would be good to have applets support in the first place it's not
going to convince me that we should keep them.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi



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