Presenting SlickPanel

When I switched to Oneiric, I tried Unity and GNOME Shell however I found I preferred my classic setup of GNOME Panel and used a external application launcher.

However, I was surprised to find that GNOME Panel had not very well maintained in Oneiric. In fact it is buggy and I had to go through some effort to get Indicators working on it.

After looking at GNOME Panel and other options (such as wingpanel) I realised there was not a quick, stable, extensible (and pretty!) desktop panel for GTK.

So I made one 🙂

SlickPanel is a modern panel that provides common tools such as a list of open windows and an indicator bar.

Its goals are:

• Provide a robust, and quick desktop panel
• Make it easy to customise and extend, rather than hide options
• Use modern technologies rather than be backwards-compatible
• Make it easy to hack on!

Current Status

SlickPanel is not ready for production use, this is an alpha release. Currently it will provide a panel at the top of the screen, containing a list of open windows (which can be minimized, maximized etc.) and the list of indicators.

In the next release I will try to focus on customisability (is that a word?) – making it easy to configure SlickPanel exactly the way you want it (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/slickpanel/+spec/configuration).

How to Install

Add the SlickPanel Daily PPA to your Software Sources and the install the package slickpanel. Then run it using the command slickpanel

More Info

All other information can be found on Launchpad (launchpad.net/slickpanel) and if anyone wants to get involved with developing etc. please get in touch (launchpad.net/~and471)