Making notification area icons into desktop services

[Amondo Roquentin <amondo globalstatic net>]

Currently, a number of GNOME applications (mis)use the Status 
Notification Area to place persistent icons for interacting with 
persistent desktop applications.

Granted, some of these only activate such icons on request. But it is 
common experience that many users find such functionality invaluable and 
will habitually activate notification area icons.

It strikes me that there are two requirements that unites all these 
applications:

(1) The application runs in the background, like on standby, and is not 
visible most of the time. In fact, it is difficult to imagine the 
application running constantly in the foreground, and its correct place 
seems to be out of the user's way. For example:
- chat/VoIP clients (Empathy, Pidgin, Ekiga, Xchat)
- feed/podcast managers and notifiers (Liferea, gPodder, GRnotifier)
- mail notifiers (mail-notification, Cgmail, Checkgmail)
- sync daemon clients (gnome-pilot, Conduit, Ubuntu One)
- hardware configuration (printers, Bluetooth)
- P2P applications (Transmission, Deluge, GNUnet)
- note database managers (Tomboy)
- (micro)blogging client (Drivel, Gwibber, Pino, twitux)

(2) The user needs to interact with the application intermittently, 
and/or respond to some kind of alert or new information. In the former 
case, this might include changing the track that is playing, chaining a 
new Bluetooth device, or creating a new Tomboy note. In the latter case, 
this might include examining new mail or feed entries or podcasts, or 
responding to a chat message or VoIP call.

I imagine that GNOME Shell could be designed to handle this class of 
desktop application by introducing a new kind of object, alongside 
Applications and Documents. The new class of object would be (desktop) 
Services.

In this way, GNOME Shell might be able to take on the notification area 
requirements of these applications by providing an interface to manage 
them. The interface would be able to list all desktop services, as well 
as start, stop, and configure them. Desktop widgets might be able to 
wrap these services in order to provide more on-the-fly configuration.

Regards,
Amondo Roquentin