Post-4.4: Appfinder

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
>>> [2] This is just an idea that came to my mind suddenly. Since
>>> creating launchers by dropping appfinder items on the panel is too
>>> difficult to implement according to Jasper, what if the panel
>>> offered a D-BUS API for adding launchers? This could work like this:
>>>       1. You click on 'Add to panel...' in the appbrowser context
>>> menu
>>>       2. The app item details (e.g. name, icon, command) are send
>>> to the panel using the D-BUS API.
>>>       3. The panel displays a list of panels on the current screen
>>> and after you select one of them, a launcher is added to it.
>>>     Sounds weird? Yes!
>> IMHO, that's not the way to go. We need to address the real problem:
>> The panel does not use .desktop files for launchers. If the panel
>> would use .desktop files, this - and several other things - would be
>> really easy: Just send the URI of the .desktop file to the panel and
>> the panel will create a launcher for it. If the .desktop file is
>> deleted, the panel will remove the launcher. If the .desktop file is
>> altered, the panel will reload the launcher. This would also allow to
>> use exo-desktop-item-edit for the panel, and so the panel would get
>> all the goodies for free, and we'd have a consistent UI for launchers
>> everywhere.
> 
> I leave that to Nick and Jasper to discuss, hehe. I agree with you in
> that desktop files for panel launchers would indeed be nice and more
> flexible.
> 
> I'll keep you (as in "the ML") informed about the appbrowser progress.
> The only thing that looks slightly non-trivial is the canvas stuff, but
> even that should be do-able.

We should probably wait for the GTK people. IIRC a GtkCanvas is planned
for one of the next releases.

>   - Jannis

Benedikt