Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Emmanuele:

> 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".

I wonder how this fits in with the gdesklets project, if at all.  I
know Calum Benson, UI engineer at Sun, has suggested that it would be
nicer from a UI perspective if there were just one desklet/applet
type interface.  Perhaps moving to a gdesklets model would be nicer?
Or do we need to reinvent the wheel here?

Also, does the avant-window-manager fit into plans at all.  In terms
of providing a nice interface for keeping track of running applications
and providing desktop shortcuts, it seems a nice alternative to
consider.

Perhaps I missed the discussion where such alternative designs are
being considered, so please forgive if I'm asking a stupid question.

Brian


> 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.