Proposing the StatusNotifier specification

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Hi,

A few months ago, Marco Martin proposed a new specification to
freedesktop.org [1] (at this time it was named NotificationItem, it has
since then be renamed to StatusNotifier to avoid confusion with the
existing Notification spec).

The goal of this specification is to replace the old x-embed protocol
used by applications to export icons in the system tray/notification
area. The new specification presents a number of advantages, quoting Marco:

"""
The new protocol is based upon D-Bus, and separates the presentation
of the items from the logic, in our case the painting is completely
controlled by Plasma and the applications registers via D-bus (with a
small clien library shared across KDE) to a central server, while
there can be zero or more instances of the systemtray.
if either the serve or no instances of systemtrays that supports this
protocol are registered the system will fall back using the old
freedesktop.org systray specification.
"""

The latest version of the specification can be found here:

http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/

This specification is already implemented by KDE in kdelibs [2] and
Canonical is working on an implementation for GNOME, libappindicator [3].

We believe the specification is a significant improvement over the
x-embed protocol and is now mature enough to be accepted as a
freedesktop.org specification.

Having the specification accepted now would make it possible for both
implementations to switch to the "org.freedesktop" DBus namespace now,
thus simplifying code because there would be no need to register two names.

What do you think of all this?

Aurélien

[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-September/011038.html

[2]:
http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-apidocs/kdeui/html/classKStatusNotifierItem.html

[3]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators