[ Resend from a typo in the To: ] On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 23:26 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote: > 2009/4/19 Emmanuele Bassi <eba...@gmail.com>: > > On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 14:34 +0200, Sebastian Pölsterl wrote: > > > >> I think it would be a big mistake to omit applets in the new gnome desktop > >> evolution. > > > > why? > > > > <cut> > > Emmanuele, do you[1] or do not have a plan for "pluggable > applications" (formerly know as applets) for GNOME 3.0? > > I think that applets developers are legitimate to be worried about > their own efforts, the only reference in gnome-shell stuff is "Design > an applet/add-on system" in Open Design Question. And 1 year could be > a short time for porting.
If there were thousands of interesting applets with complex user interfaces then a year might be a short time for porting. But that isn't the case - there are just a tiny handful of useful applets. The main open question for gnome-shell is not how to implement them. It's the user interface question. And when we look at the user interface question I think the label "applet" is a bit deceptive. We have all sort of different things that are applets, and their only commonality is that they go on the panel. The better approach is to start from the tasks and functionality Let me try to characterize the list of things in my "Add to Panel..." I'll start off with the small set of applets that I think are worth thinking about when designing Information Display =================== We have a few applets that display information to the user; the set of conceivable applets that do this is almost indefinitely extensible (look at available Google gadgets), but not within the scope of a 24-pixel panel. (Note that you have to click on 2 out of the three listed here to actually get the information.) Invest System Monitor Weather Monitor Specialized UI Enhancements =========================== We also have a number of applets that add controls to the panel. Some of these are more useful than others, but they are generally genuinely useful to some set of people. Character Palette Dictionary Lookup Pilot Applet Sticky Notes Time Tracker Tomboy Notes And moving on to everything else: "Crack" ======= We have quite a few applets that either I don't know what they do or I'm embarrassed to know what they do. I have no trouble with this stuff existing, but it shouldn't be mixed in with useful stuff on a default install, and it's outside the scope of design. Brightness applet CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Command Line Drawer Dwell Click Force Quit Inhibit Applet Pointer Capture Toys ==== These are similar to "Crack" except that their operation could easily be explained to non-geeks. (if not their existence) Eyes Fish Parts of the Core UI ==================== Quite a few of the available "applets" just make up things that we expect always to be there. The user doesn't want to remove or add them. (Obviously not everything here is part of the default panel, because of design indecision.) Clock Keyboard Accessibility Status Keyboard Indicator Main Menu Menu Bar Notification Area Show Desktop Trash User Switcher Workspace Switcher Window List Window Selector Desktop design copouts ====================== Then there are applets that are about making it marginally faster to do things that should be obvious and fast to do without an applet to do them. If these are useful, we've misdesigned. Connect to a Server... Disk Mounter Lock Screen Log Out... Run Application... Search for Files... Shutdown.. So, a large part of what we have just drops out - it's not relevant. An additional portion is best handled by something like Firefox extensions - it's great for advanced users if there is a big ecosystem of them out there. But they aren't something you design for and the programming API is probably just giving them free access to the Javascript internals of gnome-shell. This applies to the "Crack" the "Toys" and maybe even the "Specialized UI Enhancements". And then some portion remains, and that is where design question lies. Do we want an optional sidebar? Do we want some approach where an extra layer of widgets/gadgets flies in when triggered? Could customizable displays be integrated into our existing Overlay mode in some fashion? The last thing I'll mention here is that I don't think we should be overly concerned with porting and applet parity. If there was no system monitor applet in GNOME 3.0, life would go on. What we should be concerned about is creating the ecosystem where it's easy and fun to do interesting things. And when we do there will inevitably be 23 competing system monitor applets whether we like it or not. - Owen _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list