The Ayatana Indicators project is the continuation of Application Indicators and System Indicators, two technologies developed by Canonical Ltd. for the Unity7 desktop.
Application Indicators are a GTK implementation of the StatusNotifierItem Specification (SNI) that was originally submitted to freedesktop.org by KDE.
System Indicators are an extensions to the Application Indicators idea. System Indicators allow for far more widgets to be displayed in the indicator's menu.
The Ayatana Indicators project is the new upstream for application indicators, system indicators and associated projects with a focus on making Ayatana Indicators a desktop agnostic technology.
On GNU/Linux, Ayatana Indicators are currently available for desktop envinronments like MATE (used by default in Ubuntu MATE), XFCE (used by default in Xubuntu, LXDE, and the Budgie Desktop).
The Lomiri Operating Environment (UI of the Ubuntu Touch OS, formerly known as Unity8) uses Ayatana Indicators for rendering its notification area and the UBports project is a core contributor to the Ayatana Indicators project.
For further info, please visit: https://ayatana-indicators.org
The -application Ayatana System Indicator is an application menu indicator for Unity7 and optionally for others, e.g. MATE, XFCE, LXDE). The indicator takes menus from applications and places them into the panel.
Its behavior and features are listed at https://wiki.ayatana-indicators.org/AyatanaIndicatorApplication
See COPYING and AUTHORS file in this project.
For instructions on building and running built-in tests, see the INSTALL.md file.