[Feature-request] Create "real" menu for favorite/pinned apps

[Florian Dorn]

The pinned-Apps ("Angeheftete Elemente" in the german translation) are currently only available inside cardapio. I suggest to create a "real" submenu, like the ubuntu-netbook-launcher does for handling it's Favorites. This way, other Apps, like the netbook launcher, or any could reuse this information.

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

Hi Florian. Can you explain how the netbook launcher handles its Favorites? I'm not familiar with it and I'm away right now so I don't want to install it on my only available machine :)

[Jan (jancborchardt-deactivatedaccount)]

As Ubuntu Netbook Edition is succeeded by Unity – which has it’s own searchable menu – this would be an Ubuntu-specific and soon deprecated fix.

[Florian Dorn (florian-dorn)]

Even with UNR beeing replaced by unity, it still makes sense to store the pinned-apps in an XDG-compliant manner. It's not just UNR, but the default gnome menu panel, the gnome menu, the KDE menu, etc. All these could share my favourite apps.
Sorry for not clarifying my point earlier.

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

Hi Florian

You say UNR and the regular Gnome and KDE menus all use an XDG-compliant way to store pinned applications. Do you happen to know how that works? Or can you point to the relevant XDG specification?

I would certainly be interested in following XDG standards in Cardapio wherever possible, but don't currently have the time to go searching around for the right documents. So if you are interested in a fast solution, it would be great if you helped out by posting them here.

(Otherwise, don't worry. This probably *will* be implemented at some point. It's just that the easier it is for me to solve it, the quicker I'll do it.)

[Florian Dorn (florian-dorn)]

As far as I know, there isn't a standardized way of marking favorites. However the spec allows desktop entries to be registered in multiple Categories [1,2]. From what I have discovered so far we need to do three things:
1. Create a favorites.directory in ~/.local/share/desktop-directories
2. Add it to the ~/.config/menus/applications.menu:
 <Menu>
  <Name>alacarte-made</Name>
  <Directory>alacarte-made.directory</Directory>
          <Include>
            <Category>Favorites</Category>
          </Include>
 </Menu>
3. add the category "Favorites" to the .desktop-files

That way, the Favorites menu will be instantly available for GNOME, KDE, ...
[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-latest.html
[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html