Proposing the StatusNotifier specification

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 14 January 2010, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> 2009/12/17 Aurélien Gâteau <aurelien.gateau at canonical.com>:
> > 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.
> 
> I am unsure how to read the Properties section of fx.
> http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/statusnotifieritem.html...
> Are we talking about properties available via an
> org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties interface, or ?

exactly.

> Perhaps it's just my browser settings, but I also find it a bit hard
> to decipher because the subsection, like
> "org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.WindowId", only have a very
> slightly bigger font than the sub-sub-headers, eg. "UINT32
> org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.WindowId  ();".

ah, docbook2html tries to be funny :)

Cheers
Marco Martin