Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2009/4/19 Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>:
> Hi!
>
> CC'ing GNOME shell list as this is probably the space this should be
> discussed.
>
>> As the deskbar-applet maintainer I'm very concerned that are no clear
>> plans for an applet/desktop widget framework, yet. I guess porting an
>> applet to the new yet-to-be-invented framework would take considerable
>> time. Because there's currently no plan for a new framework it will take
>> some time until there is a time and the framework is actually usable.
>> Hopefully it's not already too late to start porting applets then. I
>> think it would be a big mistake to omit applets in the new gnome desktop
>> evolution.
>
> I don't think applets in the way we think of them currently are a very
> great thing and they have been overused in the past (as have
> notifications). Nevertheless, some applets are generally useful, like
> tomboy or hamster.
>
> For deskbar, I think it should be integrated with gnome-shell itself. It
> already has some box to type so this could evolve into a deskbar input
> box.
>
> For the others the point of bringing up a standard is not that bad imho.
> Let's face it that have have about 1 year left and even in this year it
> would be ok to have standard draft that is implemented in GNOME 3.0 and
> is 90% stable while the rest 10% missing for the 1.0 standard release
> can be done afterwards.
>
> This API should contain the possibilty to add a "widget" (likely an
> XWindow of some kind) into some "panel" that is *not* just an icon
> because we have the notification area for icons.

The K-team is already way ahead of us here. Reading
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/04/system-trays.html should give a
good idea where they are heading. And basically I agree with them;
XEmbed is a bad choice for a long list of reasons. Fx. You can not
have two system trays (or more specifically - you can only have the
same tray icon in one system tray), trays can't control/affect icon
behavior, and other nitty gritty stuff that just makes it a very short
sighted solution if you ask me.

I will see if I can find some docs about their protocol.

-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel