Cardapio in various enviroments

[keirangtp 2010-10-12]
I'll work on AWN and Docky. ;)

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[jancborchardt 2010-10-12]
Nice! :) Especially about the dock stuff, what do you think about automatically using the minimal layout there? http://www.flickr.com/photos/jancborchardt/4936749295/
It would especially be useful with search bar and categories on bottom (as docks are mostly on the bottom) so that a) it is not that clunky and b) the eyes are guided right.

Maybe an option for layout is best:
Layout switch: (automatic), (always big), (always minimal)
With slightly better wording though.
Also see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cardapio/+spec/design-discussion and the code at https://code.launchpad.net/~jancborchardt/cardapio/minimal-layout

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[keirangtp 2010-10-12]
The problem is - Cardapio misses theming. At certain point I almost switched to GnoMenu because of their theming support but it lacked many other things and I eventually switched back to Cardapio.

I think that the "minimal or normal layout" problem is a simple theming choice and we shouldn't make it on behalf of the users. I, for example, really like the minimal layout but considering the size of my monitor I'd prefer to use the normal one, whether Cardapio would be on the panel or on a dock of some kind. So...

1. If user can choose his theme, the problem probably disappears.
2. If we really want a special theme for docks, we can have one but remember that I'm going to write monitor-side-independent dock helpers so the theme should somehow work in all four possible positions (top-right-bottom-left).

All of this is pretty abstract since theming is a second class citizen in Cardapio. If it even exists. Correct me if I'm wrong.

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[tvst 2010-10-13]

For what it's worth, I think having a special "dock" theme is a bad idea. If people are really that interested in themeing, and if it doesn't add any weight to Cardapio's speed, then we can consider themeing so long as it applies to *all* instances of Cardapio. Be it when running on a dock, on the panel, or in launcher mode.

However, my vote for now is against any such themeing, so chances are that I will not be implementing it anytime soon (just because developers tend to work on what they think is most interesting). Of course, as usual you are free to implement the themeing capability on a separate, at which point we as a team should seriously evaluate its inclusion into the PPA.

About XFCE: I would love to have Cardapio work on the XFCE panel, *BUT* as it is Cardapio depends on some Gnome libraries, which kind of defeats the purpose. Maybe if we can replace them with desktop-agnostic alternatives, then we can start thinking about an XFCE applet...

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[tvst 2011-1-17]

If anyone is interested in trying that XFCE implementation, here is how to do it:
http://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins

Hopefully, now that I'm almost done cleaning up the Cardapio code (separating the View from the Controller and Model) I will also try to separate all Gnome-specific code from the main parts as well. This would make a possible XFCE port (and LXDE too!) much more useful.