Panel Status - GNOME 2.0

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com>]

Heya,
So Mark and myself had this great plan on Tuesday that we would sit down
and write a panel status mail to scare the living shit out of people and
convince everyone to hack on the panel....Well obviously, we forgot, so
I'm writing this mail from my point of view....this could be very far
from the truth :/ [and actually I will probably exaggerate things for
better effect].

- Easter Eggs
All easter eggs are broken [1]

- Menus
George has written a vfolder module for gnome-vfs which needs to be
implemented in the panel. The vfolder method for implementing George's
plan about how menus are sorted [2]

Ditem is also quite broken. It has been ported to gnome-vfs [mostly] and
barely works. It's completely broken wrt to encoding. I spent all day
trying to figure out why it wasn't working better...so now it is,
slightly, even if it really only displays nice icons on the panel once
again.
Also for some weird reason, when panels are set to autohide, the menus
aren't getting drawn.

- Panel Configuration
I've spent quite a while looking at the various global configuration
options and have since removed a large proportion of them. There is now
a schema file [only initial hacked up version] for the global panel
config.

GConf'izing hasn't happened very much. In fact the panel probably uses
70% gnome_config and 30% gconf right now. No notification has been added
as yet. The intention is to follow Havoc's session proposal [3]. I think
it would probably be best to go with gconf for the global properties and
keep everything else using gnome_config for now. Notifications for the
global properties is, I think, a must.

- GObject & properties
A rather inconsistant, botched job so far. Been slowly changing things
to have a more consistant approach with the rest of GNOME 2.0 but lots
of work to be done here and probably much breakage and assed cracked
hacking. Panel still uses *huge* construct calls which would be better
done with properties.

- Applets
Actually I think this is the most promising bit for the GNOME 2.0 panel.
Applets are now bonobo controls and work is progressing very well for
this. Actually Mark could fill you in more about this because he's been
doing most of the work. In any case, the controls have context menus,
can be moved around and oriented. They are looking quite funky. The old
applet api is being deprecated/trashed.

- Accessibility
We've briefly talked to Bill and Calum about this. It's not quite a
priority now at the moment, but it really *has* to be done before the
GNOME 2.0 release [4]. We have a few notes and will discuss it with them
later on in development.

- Summary
Build GNOME 2.0 libraries. Build gnome-core/panel. Watch it die, right
out of the box!. Marvel at those broken menus. Amaze your friends when
panels start disappearing from your screen. Don't blame us because we're
the only ones hacking on it at the moment. Find a bug, fix it. Make the
world a better place to be. Break into histerics when you see the
release schedule. The panel *needs* YOU!.

		Anyway, enough scare-mongering.
				See ya,
					Glynn :)


[1] Right, that's got George on board

[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2001-June/msg00029.html

[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2001-October/msg00128.html

[4] It's the center point of the desktop after all