KNotificationItem specification - first draft

Marco Martin notmart at gmail.com
Sat Sep 5 10:20:48 BST 2009


Hello everyone,
In the past few months in KDE we worked on a new way to represent the
systemtray icons to overcome the following limitations:
-lack of communication between the systemtray area and the items, that
mean we don't know about their status, their importance of if they are
being used or not
-the xembed process is quite slow and doesn't give control to the
systray on the paining
-it's not possible to have more than one systray (useful in multi
monitor setups)

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.

KDE has already a complete and working implementation of the protocol,
usedby several core applications

the specification is on gitorious:
http://gitorious.org/~notmart/xdg-specs/notmart-xdg-specs/commits/notificationitem

questions and comments are more than welcome

Cheers,
Marco Martin



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