Re: Making notification area icons into desktop services

[Lucas David-Roesler <roesler lucas gmail com>]

Amondo Roquentin wrote:

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

I believe that Ubuntu's Ayanta project is working on something that addresses this: 

https://launchpad.net/indicator-application .  They have already done work to use this with Rhythmbox.  I know that there is a good blog post on this but I can not find it right now.

~Lucas David-Roesler