A Better Future Through
Panel Applets
Davyd Madeley
GNOME Applets Maintainer

About Me
Current GNOME Applets Maintainer
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have been, since about GNOME 2.7.1
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Studying Electronic Engineering and Computer
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Science at the University of Western Australia

Help Hackers Beer Fund
Help system hackers need drinks too
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Buy Shaun a beer today!
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About the Panel
GNOME has had a panel... forever
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The panel contains two types of
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items;launchers and applets
Each applet type is its own process which
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appears in the panel via Bonobo
Multiple applets of the same type share a
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process, each is instantiated from the Bonobo
factory

Why Do We Want New Applets?
The current API has limitations
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Has no links to session management
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No easy way to remove applets from the panel
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Applets are hard to debug (for some)
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A portable API that works on other desktops?
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XFCE? KDE?
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People are writing notification icons instead of
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panel applets for portability to KDE
Drop the dependency on Bonobo?
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There is a big move away from Bonobo in GNOME
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Types of Applets
There are three types of applets:
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session based applets
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clock, multiload, wncklet, gweather
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hardware based applets
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battstat, netstatus, mixer, cpufreq
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notification applets
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gaim, muine, rhythmbox
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What Should Good Applets Do?
Applets should be easy to add and remove
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from the panel
Hardware applets should “Plug and Play”
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appears when the hardware is inserted; vanishes
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when removed
Drop down menus and interaction should be
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consistent between applets
You should be able to move the mouse
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between applets and have the menu focus
follow pointer (like a traditional menu)

Options, Options, Options
Rewrite entire of Panel?
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not such a great idea
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we'll end up bringing lots of old bugs back to life
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Rewrite libpanel-applet
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this might be ok
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can we use the same API for all three types of
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applets?
base all applets around the Notification Area spec, but
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with extra wrapping
Notification Area is an accepted specification on other
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platforms: KDE? XFCE?

Rethinking Applets
Turn entire panel into one big system tray that
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you can easily add or remove applets from
Instead of adding applets in a specific place,
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you have cursors where types of applets are
placed
Still able to drag applets around
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D-BUS IPC
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???
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Adding Applets to the Panel

Adding Applets to the Panel

Fin ;)
Questions? Ideas? Suggestions?
gnome-utils-list@gnome.org
www.davyd.id.au/articles.shtml