Comment 8 for bug 688156

Having now investigated the ins and outs of Unity, it would appear that Unity aims to integrate menu and search functionality quite tightly in the form of their Places API. Thus I don't know how amenable Canonical are going to be towards defining a new menu-applet standard.

That being said, it's probably worth a shot, and in any case your involvement in the arena of the indicator frameworks rather immature UI standards could prove beneficial to all. By way of an example; a recent mock-up (attached for your convenience) of a proposed joint me/messenger menu posted by Saleel Velankar to the Ayatana mailing list could not (as far as I am aware) be implemented given the paltry UI standards currently available.

Of course such would (I assume) require re-implementation of Cardapio within such a framework, which may be a little over the top given the circumstances. However, I suspect that (with respect to Unity) it's either this or use your existing launcher a'la docky. It's worth noting that re-implementation within an indicator framework would be cross platform in and of itself, as (as I understand) the indicator framework was designed with cross platform implementation in mind (although I don't know where indicators stand where Gnome Shell is concerned).

Anyway, that's all so much waffle from an ill educated lay-man. If any of it is incorrect or naive do forgive me.