Comment 43 for bug 334344

The reason that we used the desktop file is becuase it provides a lot of nice information. The high resolution icon, the name, the description and those are already translatable. Desktop applications on Linux do have desktop files whether they get added by upstream sources or distributors. For instance, Thuderbird wouldn't show up in the software center to be installed unless it had a desktop file.
We haven't uploaded the API documentation anywhere on the web officially. It is included in the libindicate-doc package. I have uploaded that here:
  http://people.canonical.com/~ted/libindicate/current/
Hopefully that helps.