[Ayatana] Application Indicators v. 2

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Ayatana,

So as Lucid winds down and UDS is coming like a freight train I thought it would be a good time to start looking at would could be done in the Maverick cycle for application indicators.  Here are some of the design issues that I see have come up in the Lucid cycle that I think need to be investigated.

Advanced Menu Styling

Some applications are using menus that are more complex than we could represent in DBusmenu for the Lucid cycle.  While it'd be nice to support everything possible, I think we're going to be limited to some subset of that.  The trick is to determine the subset.  I think that it makes sense to target applications in Ubuntu's Main repository first, and make sure we can handle the menu items they need to be complete.

The most glaring one to me is Tomboy's pins for notes.  What are some others?  (a screen shot and a description of functionality would be helpful)  What problems are they trying to solve that can't be done with standard menu items?

Custom Icons

For application indicators we're currently only taking icon names for the icons.  This allows for consistent theming of the icons along with the panel theme.  The problem that this creates is when dealing with dynamically generated icons.  There are several applications that abuse this (Bacula comes to mind) but applications like GNOME Settings Daemon uses this for the current keyboard layout (putting two letters of text as the icon).  I'd prefer to avoid sending all the theme information and update signals required to implement drawing of the icon to the application.  Is there another way that we can provide dynamic icons?

Quick Lookup Information

Applications have previously have made some information quickly available by using a tooltip on the icon.  While I don't wish to start the tooltip discussion again, what I'm curious about is we can't find a solution for this information that isn't a tooltip.  Does some sort of standard menu item help?  Could we put it somewhere else?

    Thanks,
        Ted

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