Comment 13 for bug 140918

I'm not sure about Gnome 3, but in the Unity launcher, when you right-click on an application, you get a binary option (checked or not) "Keep in launcher". If there were another option added to this list called something like "Autostart" or "Open on start-up", it would be fantastic. Checking it would stick it in the start-up list (making it editable by power users), and unchecking it would remove the entry (or possibly just disable it).

Gnome 3 probably works similarly, but I haven't played with it yet.