Re: Applets? [was Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0]

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 22:54 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> [ Resend from a typo in the To: ]
> 
> On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 23:26 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> > 2009/4/19 Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>:
> > > 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?
> > >
> > 
> > <cut>
> > 
> > Emmanuele, do you[1] or do not have a plan for "pluggable
> > applications" (formerly know as applets) for GNOME 3.0?
> > 
> > I think that applets developers are legitimate to be worried about
> > their own efforts, the only reference in gnome-shell stuff is "Design
> > an applet/add-on system" in Open Design Question. And 1 year could be
> > a short time for porting.
> 
> If there were thousands of interesting applets with complex user
> interfaces then a year might be a short time for porting. But that isn't
> the case - there are just a tiny handful of useful applets.
> 
> The main open question for gnome-shell is not how to implement them.
> It's the user interface question. And when we look at the user interface
> question I think the label "applet" is a bit deceptive. We have all sort
> of different things that are applets, and their only commonality is that
> they go on the panel. The better approach is to start from the tasks and
> functionality
> 
> Let me try to characterize the list of things in my "Add to Panel..."
> I'll start off with the small set of applets that I think are worth
> thinking about when designing

I would add "Application Controller" to this list.  There
are a number of applications that have either an applet
or a notification area thing, enabling quick interactions.
The difference between the two is an irrelevant technical
distinctions.  They bought might as well be called applets
for this conversation.

(I'm talking about Empathy, Pidgin, RhythmBox, and Banshee
here.  And probably quite a lot more.)

Lots of us will go on about how it's a broken design and
how applications shouldn't be doing that.  But it's done
because people find it useful, warts and all.  So rather
than declare it broken (which it is) and throw it away,
we should try to come up with a way to solve the same
problems in a non-broken way.

--
Shaun