Re: Will traditional notification area be available in gnome-shell 3.0?

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 07:23 -0700, Sandy Armstrong wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have a few questions regarding Tomboy in gnome-shell 3.0:
> 
> 1) Will there still be a regular old notification area available, so
> that Tomboy can run in the tray as it always has? (obviously running
> in the tray is evil, blah blah blah, let's not get into that right
> now)

Well, it is evil ;-)

At least for the time being, tray icons are still displayed - the
notification area is now restricted to system status items, but other
icons have been moved to the message tray at the bottom. That said,
their use is highly discouraged, and the designers are pushing hard for
having them replaced.


> 2) Are there any new or upcoming features in gnome-shell 3.0 that
> would allow Tomboy to reimplement its note menu directly in the shell
> (something like right-clicking the app icon), so that the notification
> area icon would no longer be necessary?

Yes - it is planned to enable applications to add custom actions to
their application menu (right next to the activities button).


> 3) Will gnome-shell 3.0 support extensions that modify the shell UI in
> arbitrary ways?

Yes and no. There are no technical restrictions of what extensions can
do - extension code has access to the entire javascript code base (just
like "official" shell code). Some arbitrary modifications like removal
of elements are very likely to break stuff though, so not everything is
possible ... arbitrary additions on the other hand are unlikely to
impose problems.