Cardapio for Unity / Gnome Shell (Ubuntu 11.04 and beyond)

Thanks for starting this discussion, Pawel.

First, I'd like to clarify about the Clutter view: this new view would be a *completely* *optional* version of the Cardapio GUI. This means that GTK would still be the primary GUI toolkit, but if you then installed a package called something like "cardapio-clutter" you would switch the default GUI to use Clutter.

(In programmer speak: Cardapio would be an MVC program with 2 interchangeable "V"s)

At the moment, I think the Clutter view would be laid out and behave pretty much like the GTK view. But it would be nicely animated, and it would follow Unity's / Gnome Shell's theme. But if you have any other ideas, this is the place to post them :)

One thing that I am pretty adamant about is that — as opposed to Unity and Shell — Cardapio should not take over the entire screen.

Ok, your turn! GO GO GO

i think no premature releases should be done :)

many people will still be using regular gnome, either because their hardware doesn't support it and fallback or they want to customize their desktops (with or without docky/awn). Cardapio should stay targeted at those people in the meantime.

We should wait till unity/gshell add enough customization options or some kind of plugin system.

plugins for dash might look interesting. But like i said is better to wait for things to settle down a bit before making a move, because i know lots of things might change after v1.0 ...

This will be the biggest change in years. So they need time to work things out at least for a release or 2,

Once unity/gshell are available lets listen to the people and see what they want / need.

I agree that Unity/Shell will need some time to settle, but it would be good to have *something* working by Natty, even if just a quick hack to get people thinking about where to go next.

Maybe there is a clear way? We should ask devs from other menu-like projects.

Also, we've done something to correct this bug already. AFAIK you can use Docky or AWN with Unity and Cardapio + Docky or Cardapio + AWN are already out there. If I'm not mistaken, integration with other docks (Cairo for example) should have high priority before Natty goes out.

I'd like to add: Don't forget the rest of us! Personally I'm an Arch user in the main and just test Ubuntu on my desktop in a separate partition. Unity at this point is like a very weak and OLD version of AWN imho. So weak that on my netbook I dropped unity and replaced it with AWN 4.1 completely. (maverick).

When gnome/ubuntu move to these new shells, I think you'll a LOT of folks moving over to XFCE so there will be need for nifty applets like this one to remain "shell-bling-specific" free as it were.

my 2 cents anyway.

An idea that comes to mind is for Cardapio's developers to work together with those of other menu projects (e.g. GnoMenu) and the Ayatana project to define a menu standard in the same vein as Ayatana's indicator standard. My understanding is that the indicator standard presently enjoys cross-platform support (in Gnome, XFCE and KDE), or am I wrong?

Another option would be to adapt Cardapio to the existing indicator standard. However menu applets such as Cardapio and GnoMenu go well beyond the remit of indicators, and indicators themselves lack several key features (e.g. a right-click menu) and have a far from stellar selection of UI elements. Your involvement could spark some improvements on that front however.

Casey: We plan on supporting as many panels as possible, concurrently. This is really easy to do, now that we have a cleanly-separated panel interface in our code :)

Lee Hyde: Great idea! Someone should talk to the Gnome or Ayatana guys about this. If nobody comes forth, I will get in touch with them myself at some point soon. (I'm a bit busy with some other Cardapio-related development right now...)

Having now investigated the ins and outs of Unity, it would appear that Unity aims to integrate menu and search functionality quite tightly in the form of their Places API. Thus I don't know how amenable Canonical are going to be towards defining a new menu-applet standard.

That being said, it's probably worth a shot, and in any case your involvement in the arena of the indicator frameworks rather immature UI standards could prove beneficial to all. By way of an example; a recent mock-up (attached for your convenience) of a proposed joint me/messenger menu posted by Saleel Velankar to the Ayatana mailing list could not (as far as I am aware) be implemented given the paltry UI standards currently available.

Of course such would (I assume) require re-implementation of Cardapio within such a framework, which may be a little over the top given the circumstances. However, I suspect that (with respect to Unity) it's either this or use your existing launcher a'la docky. It's worth noting that re-implementation within an indicator framework would be cross platform in and of itself, as (as I understand) the indicator framework was designed with cross platform implementation in mind (although I don't know where indicators stand where Gnome Shell is concerned).

Anyway, that's all so much waffle from an ill educated lay-man. If any of it is incorrect or naive do forgive me.

This quick hack gets the clutterview functioning in my version of Natty (beta 1)... http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/10/nautilus-elementary-in-ubuntu-maverick.html

I agree these functions are essential for a 'modern' Linux file manager.

Mark: I'm not sure to which comment you are replying...

But here is an update on this general topic:

At the moment, Cardapio works with the classic Gnome-2 Panel, as well as with Docky, AWN, Cairo dock (unofficially), Slingshot (official from the Elementary side, not from us) and, of course, without a panel.

Also, over the past few months, we have separated most of the GTK-related code from the main application logic of Cardapio, which means we can start thinking of developing a Clutter-based interface. So things are in pretty good shape right now to keep Cardapio relevant post Unity/Shell.

That said, some things I would like to see for Cardapio in the future are:

1) Support for the XFCE panel
2) Less reliance on Gnome-related dependencies
3) *Complete* separation of GTK-related code from application logic
4) A modern Clutter-based UI

I already tried starting items (1) and (4), but there were some blocking issues on my machine due to libraries/versions that are not available in Ubuntu 10.10. Since I cannot devote as much time to this as I would like, I have no plans to hunt down the correct software packages, compile them, and risk breaking my main work machine. So, realistically, I can only start thinking of pursuing those tasks after I upgrade to Natty (11.04).

About tasks (2) and (3), we should get on them ASAP. On my side, I will try to finalize (3), since it's already almost there :)

Just wanted to post a link to a possible direction for allowing Cardapio to run on Gnome Shell. Look at the "Application Menu" Shell extension in the link below:

http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/extensions/index.html

Any volunteers to get this started? :)

Hi

be carrefull before upgrade to 11.04
After having upgraded a machine, I have some bugs I'm going to have to crush with a fresh install.
I personally keep my machine for work under 10.10.
It is wise to install 11.04 on a separate partition or another PC.
For me in 11.04 unity is a baby who needs to grow

Bye Jluc

I've had some good progress on the Gnome Shell front today:

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6125/5991068118_732b24f92b.jpg

I will post the code into trunk soon so you can all help me tweak it :)

I was curious to see if Cardapio worked with AWN in Natty, but it doesn't seem to. YAMA does pretty much the same thing, so I'll just use that.

Hi Christopher

Cardapio works fine on AWN for me in Natty. What is the error that you are seeing?

Also please open a new bug report for this :)