Re: Active Applications list

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> Lots of people are talking about a concern they have with the design
>> of Gnome Shell (for valid reasons in my opinion) and your basically
>> telling them to button up because your not changing the design . . .I
>> didn't think this was what open source was about.
>
> No, I don't. If you have something has hasn't been discussed in the
> mailing list archive, a new point or a new discussion line than feel
> free to post that. But as of now I haven't seen that and the designers
> (note: I am neither a gnome-shell developer nor designers) have
> responded to all what is currently discussed in the past. Probably a FAQ
> entry listing questions and answers would be great if someone wants to
> read through the archive.
>
> I am just a bit tired to read the same discussion for the fourth or
> fifth time now. Note that I also started one of these threads month
> ago...

If the same question is asked again, maybe the answer was not
satisfactory, or the problems does exists even though developers
strongly say no. I've always though that the first rule of marketing
was "customers first", or in this case "users first". If some user
complain and some are fine with this approach, make the solution
optional.

By the way, in this discussion I posted actual code (not perfect yet,
but working), not mockups, design questions or rants.


On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Marcus Moeller <mail marcus-moeller de> wrote:
> Dear Giovanni,
>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> Could you perhaps leave us a note how to integrate/use it?
>>
>> It is not a patch, it is a standard GNOME Shell extension, so to use
>> it, just untar the package into $XDG_DATA_DIR/gnome-shell/extensions
>> (~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions) and reload the shell.
>> Of course, in the future the Shell should have some extension manager,
>> but for all users of this mailing list manual management should be
>> easy enough
>
> I have extracted the archive to a newly created folder
> ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
>
> The archive contains a folder with the extension. Do I have to keep
> the files in the folder or move them to extensions?
>
> Besides that, how and where should the extension appear?

Every extension is represented as a folder inside one of the GNOME
Shell extension folders (/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions and
~/.local/share/extensions). The name of this folder is the ID of the
extension, which is purposefully similar to an email. In this case it
is activeapps scampa giovanni gmail com, if you notice the part after
@ is my email with @ transformed into a dot.
Inside the extension you find the stylesheet (which is copied
unmodified from the example extension included with gnome-shell, and
it's not actually used), some metadata in json form, and finally the
code, which is extension.js.
GNOME Shell automatically recognizes any folder in the extension
directory, whose name is a valid ID and whose metadata is correct.
Therefore, by only having that folder inside your local extension
directory, upon restarting the shell you should see an application
list next the application menu.
Please note that this extension has been tested against current GIT HEAD.
For more informations on extensions: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions

If you have any doubt, don't hesitate to mail me :)

Giovanni