Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2009/4/19 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.

Ok, here it is: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/NewSystemTray.
And some related reading on why this is needed:
http://www.notmart.org/index.php/Software/Introducing_Notification_Icons

Anyways, this was not about system tray icons, but about applets, so
it is a bit off.

Regarding applets I am simply not sure it is feasible to come up with
a standards based scheme that isn't just "HTML with callbacks over
DBus" or something similar. One thing that I am certain about though -
it is bad idea to spend a lot of time talking about whether or not we
need a new applet framework. If someone is burning for it, just grab
your keyboards and start hacking :-)

-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel