Re: Gnome 2.14 Module Proposal: Deskbar Applet

["Nigel Tao" <nigel tao myrealbox com>]

Please, let's stop cross-posting, and settle on desktop-devel-list.


> There is a difference between having applets
> somewhere and having the officialy inside the
> desktop environment.

That's a good point.

Currently, Deskbar (which hopefully will be the hot new verb of 2006 :-) is hosted on GNOME CVS, tracks issues with GNOME Bugzilla, and discussions take place on a GNOME mailing list.  Even if it does not make part of the official GNOME 2.14 module set, I would like to release 1.0 at the same time as GNOME 2.14, and be of comparable quality.

Contact-lookup-applet is similarly in GNOME CVS, but out of the official GNOME desktop, and my distribution ships it as part of a standard GNOME install.  That's all good.

So what gain would Deskbar have to be stamped as officially Part Of GNOME?

One is bigger exposure of (in my humble, biased opinion) useful functionality.  Two is simply bragging rights and some "Wow" in "What's new in GNOME 2.14".

More subtly, other applications can then rely on the Deskbar being part of GNOME.  It's extensible, so that, for example, Tomboy can supply a Deskbar "back-end" - simply a page or two's worth of Python in the right place - so that you can type a fragment of a note title to jump to that note.

Downsides?  It pulls in the Python gnomeapplet bindings as a dependency, but I believe that this is not an issue.  It duplicates some existing functionality (mini-commander, contact-lookup-applet) although I would like to think that Deskbar is "better" and others can be deprecated.  Inclusion in GNOME adds an expectation that it will be maintained in the future, as part of GNOME 2.16, 2.18, and so on.  I'm happy with that.  It's also a bit of a power user feature, and probably won't help me get laid [1].  :)

And of course, there are quality (i.e., performance) concerns - memory consumption and startup speed.  Like everybody, I would like smaller and faster, but I don't think that the Deskbar is fundamentally problematic, PROVIDED that it is an optional feature, and not part of the default desktop experience (and therefore not replace the Alt-F2 "run" dialog, at this point in time).  Some people have tried it and found it wanting by their standards, and they would decline the option.  That's fine by me.


Nigel.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html