Unity Application Indicators using Python 3

Unity replaced the old mess of confusing and inconsistent individual notifications with a standardized set of Application Indicators, each at the head of a customized menu.

Here's how to create your own Indicator and associated menu using Python 3.


Prerequisite packages: python3-gi

sudo apt-get install python3-gi

Documentation and API reference for python 3 and GTK+ 3.
Documentation for the Unity-specific AppIndicator class.


Hello World: Let's use the test script at developer.ubuntu.com. There are two python scripts, use the PyGI. The other, PyGTK, is deprecated and Gtk is now included in PyGI.

The Hello World script is a bit long, so I won't copy it here. But it's easy enough to cut-and-paste.

The key points are:

1) Create an Application Indicator object:
      id = "Name of this client application"
      icon_name = "icon-name"                   Icons are in /usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-*-16
      category = appindicator.IndicatorCategory.APPLICATION_STATUS      List of categories
      indicator = appindicator.Indicator.new (id, icon_name, category)

2) Create the associated menu:

    menu = Gtk.Menu()
    item = Gtk.MenuItem("Menu Item #1")
    menu.append(item)
    item.show()
    item = Gtk.MenuItem("Menu Item #2")
    menu.append(item)
    item.show()

3) Attach the menu to the Application Indicator object

    indicator.set_menu(menu)

4) Make it work

    Gtk.main()

Adding python event notifications to the Desktop

Figured out how to get a Python script pop up a notification bubble on the desktop:

It uses the pynotify frontend to libnotify. It's not part of the python 2.5 base, but is included with the Ubuntu default install. Here's a test script for my Ubuntu system. It pops up a little bubble from the system tray

import pygtk
import pynotify

pynotify.init( "Some Application or Title" )
n = pynotify.Notification("Title", "body", "dialog-warning")
n.set_urgency(pynotify.URGENCY_NORMAL)
n.show()

Tip: The .init() call is neccessary, or you'll get a lot of ugly DBUS and GTK errors.

Changing Stuff: Simply replace the elements("Title", "body", "dialog-warning") with your desired title, body, and image path. The image display will take .jpg, .png, .svg, and likely others. For example...


n = pynotify.Notification("Milwaukee Without A Car", "The Python script MWC_Webcrawler has completed a scheduled run. The logfile has been added to your desktop", "/usr/share/icons/Rodent/48x48/apps/gnome-info.png")