How to design countdown app without status icons

I’m running GNOME Shell 40.2 with Wayland. I found this post Status of 'Status Icon' in GNOME Shell that says status icons in Gnome are deprecated.

I was thinking of creating a simple countdown (pomodoro) app. This would be an app that runs in the background after starting a countdown. In order to stay focused on my work, it would seem ideal to use a status icon to show the progress of the countdown. Otherwise, I’d have to flip back and forth between windows to check how much time is remaining. Once the countdown is done, then a notification would appear.

Is there an alternative to status icon that could be used for this? Or perhaps a different way to think about the problem?

A status icon would not be what you want there anyway, because it’s just an icon, it won’t be able to show a numeric timer.

A quick search shows this shell extension for an example of how this could be designed: Time ++ - GNOME Shell Extensions

Ah, ok. Seems like they’re possibly using MessageTray for the dynamic timer icon.

https://github.com/zagortenay333/timepp__gnome/blob/master/sections/pomodoro.js#L576
https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/blob/master/js/ui/messageTray.js

Is that also deprecated?

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray

MessageTray is still there, you would create a new source like that to display notifications in the normal way along with other notifications. You could also add static entry to the CalendarMessageList similar to the mpris section.

For something on the panel with arbitrary widgets, you would have to add another PanelMenuButton.

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