Comment 36 for bug 660620

Someone just emailed me asking about the status of Docky support, so I though I might as well post my reply here. This is a summary of what Pawel (mostly) and I (to a smaller degree) have been up to in the past week or two:

For a few weeks we have been trying all sorts of crazy hacks to get Cardapio on Docky, since Docky itself is not really made with main menus in mind. Plus, we'd like to make the installation process as simple as possible. The three options that Docky gives us are:

1) We could write a docklet that opens Cardapio when clicked. However, docklets can only reside on the right side of the dock, which is not a good position.

2) We could install Cardapio as a regular application launcher in your dock. When you click it, Cardapio appears. Then we'd write a helper to add custom context menu options to Cardapio, such as the "About Gnome" launcher and so on. The downside of this is that although it can live on the left side of the dock, there is no /good/ way to automatically add app launcher to Docky -- so the user would have to do it manually. Also, what we would /really/ like is for Cardapio to be the /first/ icon on the dock, which is not allowed by Docky. (this is what the version in that branch does, and I'm not sure if it is complete)

3) We could set up the "Dock" button show Cardapio when clicked. This is easy to do programatically, and very clean. But it does not let us set custom context menu options.

We have chatted with some Docky developers and it is unlikely that they will ever change Docky to allow docklets on the left side or launchers as the leftmost icon. So we're left with option (3). Then, to bypass the lack of a proper context menu on the icon, we'd just make Cardapio's own context menu show "About Gnome" and friends. There are still some questions about /how/ exactly we'll present to the user the option to add Cardapio to Docky. So this is what we're working on right now.

Long story short: for a seamless installation experience you'll have to wait a couple more weeks. But if you're willing to edit some gconf settings by hand, you can try this for now https://answers.launchpad.net/cardapio/+faq/1148 . (Note that in the final version of the Docky code we hope to make Cardapio's window placement a bit more robust, so there are some enhancements coming in that direction)