Support a container for gnome panel applets

[Adi Roiban]

In the new unity interface, it seems like the old TrayIcons (System tray) are still supported and there is a dedicated container for them. This is a great feature since Ubuntu will still be able to use legacy application that have not switched to the new notification system, or applications which are to complex to be converted to the new notification system (nm-applet).

In the last 5 years since people have used Ubuntu they get used with various gnome panel applets.
With the plans of pushing Unity on the desktop, it looks like users will not have any easy way of continuing using their favorite gnome panel applets.

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

We have indicator support in unity and people starts to create some indicators as a replacement to an old and deprecated technology which are applets which won't be part of GNOME3 (meaning, all the GNOME stack we will use will drop support of applets).

You can see a lot of indicators contributed by the community like the weather one, the ubuntu one indicator and so on. I think people who are interested in them will just create them.

[Adi Roiban (adiroiban)]

The current indicators are very simple and I am not aware of any indicator replacing Tomboy, Hamster or implementing something similar to NetworkManager. I know that Tomboy and NetworkManager can run as a SystemTray icon.

I know that it is much easier to forget about the past and start building from scratch a new future but the lack of backward compatibility in Ubuntu could alienate some of the more conservative users.

I am not sure if all developers will be happy to reimplement or strip down the functionality of they applet in order to fit the current indicators framework.

I have opened this bug to know the opinion of Canonical Desktop Experience Teams related to backward compatibility of Gnome applets.

Cheers

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

Tomboy is already an indicator (if you run tomboy without having it in the panel, you get the indicator). NM indicator is already planned (it's not an applet, it's part of the systray btw).

Most of applets aren't maintained already and please, keep in mind that the applet is deprecated in GNOME technology and won't make it for GNOME3, not by ubuntu on its own.