Some sort of run-once mechanism to stop people from hammering on Dock icons

[jdreed]

Some of the software in AFS takes a moment or two to throw up its splash screen. This causes users to think nothing happened, and they should hammer on the icon. We should come up with some sort of "run once" mechanism that either throws up a "Please wait" dialog, or yells at you if you try to run something twice, etc.

The UI effect (which will be enough to deter most people) can be achieved with:
yes | zenity --progres --text="Launching MATLAB, please wait" --pulsate --no-cancel --timeout 5 &

[geofft]

There's a built-in "please wait" mechanism based on the StartupWMClass option of the  XDG desktop entry spec. See also the  XDG startup notification spec. Find the class of the splash or initial screen that's being displayed, e.g. with xwininfo, and list that in the .desktop file for the launcher.

On Ubuntu, you might also be interested in the watershed package, in case you can't get that to work.

[jdreed]

StartupWMClass is neat, and mostly works. We should consider setting it (for people who drag icons into the dock), however you don't get the pulsating if you launch it from the "Start Menu" (i.e. if it's not already in the "Dock"). I think gathrun should also grow an option to pop-up a "launching" dialog as described above.