Show unpinned applications with available LauncherEntry DBus interface

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff]

Following up on bug 1155789, here's a finer point that's also required for "background notificators" use case: Plank should show the launcher not only if the relevant app has a window open, but also if it has a badge or progressbar.

This might be a not a good idea in the general case, but that's up to me to judge. If it isn't, we'll probably have to extend Unity's LauncherAPI instead.

Update-manager currently implements that using an ugly hack: it displays a window and then issues a minimize request. This usually causes flickering and other issues with the window manager, and doesn't allow e.g. checking for new email using a standalone lightweight daemon instead of running the whole email client UI.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

I'm not sure that D-bus interface availability is a good indicator; I'd expect any app running in background and occasionally showing something in the dock to have its D-bus interface available at all times. That's what code examples from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/LauncherAPI do (I've checked with D-feet) and there seems to be no documented way to terminate the D-bus interface.

So I suggest also checking if either the badge or the progressbar is visible and only showing the icon if one of them is visible. Disregard the suggestion if terminating the D-bus interface client-side is reasonably easy and generally makes sense.

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

Fixed in r767

[Doug McMahon (mc3man)]

This 'doesn't' appear to be working out that well in 13.04, at least with unity mail.
The icon first appeared with a new notification, now it never leaves the dock & no apparent way to remove it if desired (unless the intention is I don't get that choice..

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

If unity-mail isn't setting the visibility of the "Count" or "Progress" to false. The dockitem won't disappear. Afaics there is a settings option which prevents that if Count is 0, HideMessagesCount in ~/.config/unity-mail.conf