Ted Gould opened the session by introducing the stack and its relationship to the stack which is now based Compiz.

He introduced the Unity notification approach. In the next Unity release, it will allow libnotifier and only traditional status icon messages from Wine and Java (all other status icon clients will be rejected).

Ted gave an overview of some of the use cases in Ubuntu for libindicate: Evolution, Gwibber and Empathy. A critical point is that libindicate is a persistent: if an app crashes, the indicator is taken with it. Indicator also has MPRIS support and Ubuntu's patches GTK+ and Qt have AppMenu support.

To do application tracking, they developed a library called BAMF which talks to X11, DBUS, and desktop files.

Application menus are split in to offline and online division: offline derived from the .desktop file and online derived from the Ubuntu AppIndicator spec.

Ted surveyed Places which is a mechanism for defining search and browseable categories for click-able items: applications, Tracker file results, web history, application history.

There were questions about the decision to move to Compiz from Mutter; nothing new was said that hasn't been written elsewhere and so I will not rehash it here.

I asked about the long-term vision of Unity; Ted replied that they really isn't any huge long-term goals beyond what has already been announced for Natty. I asked if there was an extensibility plan; Ted replied that extensions should be done through AppIndicators.

Federico started a long side conversation about how to get one, unified Activity Journal interface shared between Shell and Unity. There was much discussion about technical feasibility of various approaches and the design philosophy of Shell. Because of the Compiz/Clutter split, the only lowest common denominator would be to XEmbed an alpha transparent window rendered by AJ. Owen said that this approach would have all kinds of problematic side effects like, for example, not working with the search results. There was a lot of desire to come up with some kind of solution so we may see something specifically for AJ.