Re: Revisiting the GNOME Panel in general...



On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 06:57 +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:

> On a review of that, there's still some bits missing from
> EggTrayIcon/notification icons we may want/need to do away with
> "applets" entirely:
> 
>   * "type" hint -- in order to place new icons intelligently, we'd need
>     some kind of associated purpose hint for them.  This could be
>     "launcher", "hardware", "information", etc.

We have a couple of fields in the existing spec, I'm not sure if there
is an existing HINT field however, from memory there is not.

>   * size negotiation -- applets can query the panel to find out it's
>     size and orientation, notification icons can't.  Possibly useful for
>     things like the contact lookup applet

Hmm, true. I hadn't thought about this to be honest. I forget that
people occasionally use non-horizontal panels.

>   * moving/re-ordering icons -- we'd need some way to be able to move
>     and re-order icons; this would need co-operation with the applet to
>     let the panel do that to it.

I don't see how, but it's possible.

>   * menus -- how do we add things like the Move, Lock & Remove menu
>     items?  How do those messages go to the panel

I had originally thought that the panel could merge menu items like it
does with current applets. However that isn't supported by the
notification area spec, it's a feature of bonobo.

> What would the applets-session-manager do?  How would that be different
> from the ordinary session-manager?

It would not have the problems currently experienced by the session
manager. The hard solution would be to fix the current session manager,
the easy solution is to write a session manager for applets, spawned by
the real session manager.

> > If an application adds an applet of the same name, the panel puts this
> > one in place instead of the static icon provided by applets session
> > manager.
> > 
> The other way I was thinking was that each launcher is in effect a cheap
> applet that keeps an eye out for this kind of thing, and also provides
> click-to-focus and things like that.

mmm, indeed I had forseen launchers as applets. This kind of work could
also be done by the applet-session-manager, although it would be cool if
we could link it with runtime applet icons (this is what I was trying to
get at).

> This needs some thought, probably worth punting towards the freedesktop
> guys as well at some point?

Yeah. I'm sure there are a few on this list who could weigh in a little.

> > Yes. I would separate the hardware applet manager from the other applet
> > manager (which would easily be part of -session or -panel).
> > 
> I figure there would be a hardware applet manager that'd add detect
> hardware and add the appropriate applets on startup, and as they're
> plugged in ... these wouldn't get saved in the session.

Agreed. Perhaps I explained it badly. The hardware manager would get
launched by session. It would save information in gconf about what sort
of hardware to show and hide (I might not care for having my eth0
connection ever displayed). Nothing about it would be saved in a session
based context.

--d

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