New property proposal for StatusNotifierItem protocol: Label

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Hi,

As part of our use of the StatusNotifierItem (SNI) protocol in Ubuntu
GNOME, we are in need of a way to associate a label to a SNI. This would
be used for example for the keyboard layout SNI (I remember a similar
discussion around the KDE SNI on kde-core-devel) and for the battery SNI.

This is needed because we consider this solution the best way to display
dynamic texts in a StatusNotifierHost (SNH).

The other solution, letting the application generate an icon with
blended text on it would make it impossible to replace the icon on the
fly with an equivalent coming from the panel-theme, impossible to resize
the icons and lead to inconsistency if two applications renders the text
with slightly different ways.

What we propose is actually adding two properties to the
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem interface:

* Label
A string containing the text to display

* LabelGuide
An optional string containing the widest possible string for Label. This
would be use by the SNH to ensure the size of the item does not change
when Label changes. For example a Battery SNI would set its LabelGuide
to "100%", so that it does not shrink when it only displays "11%".
If not set, the SNH is expected to adjust dynamically to fit the label.
This is expressed as a string because the application cannot know how
wide in pixel the text can be.

I think this would give more flexibility and I can see a use for this
new property in a few KDE applications, KMail and Choqok for example
could use it to show the message count, the keyboard layout indicator
could use it as well.

What do you think?

Aurélien