Is it possible to alter and update the status icon of a running indicator applet?

Solution 1:

This is indeed not the intended behaviour of Application Indicators: they're meant to have one or two icons and not something that you could almost put in a widget.

There seems to be something wrong in the caching of the icon, as it should update a changed icon, though.

Anyway, you probably want to use something like 'libindicator' to create your own, custom indicator. The collection of application indicators on your panel is drawn by one indicator. You have a lot more functions at your disposal when writing a custom indicator, than when using the limited API of Application Indicators, which was limited deliberately to make sure we don't get a mess.

Also make sure to look at the package 'libindicator-tools', which contains some handy utilities for testing indicators.

Solution 2:

I don't think this is possible and looks like it's by design, from the bug report.

What we instead would like to encourage is for people to start thinking like icon themes. The reason for this is that it allows for multiple sizes and theming of the panel separate from applications. So, for instance, an application could be themed with a light background (thus needing dark icons) and the panel could have a dark background (needing light icons). The application shouldn't have to know about this. And by using icon naming this problem is solvable on the panel side of things.

For the Natty cycle we also want to provide a convenience API to provide for building a custom icon theme for people who want to generate icons. This doesn't solve all of the theming problems, but it does make it possible to solve the multiple sizes one.

Update: To answer your comment Ted thinks that is a bug and recommends that you file a bug on indicator-application, something along the lines of "theme updates are not realized by the indicators"