Music Applet is a small, simple GNOME panel applet that lets you control a variety of different music players from the panel. Music Applet provides easy access to information about the current song and the most important playback controls.

Busyhot is a nice little Gnome panel applet for showing real time CPU load time and temperature from click of a mouse in your desktop.

Not so long ago we discovered a simplified version of Nautilus which seems to miss Ubuntu Karmic after all so the only way to get it is through it's PPA. But still, one of the most requested features in Nautilus must be the dual-panel view, which gives you the ability to work in two directories at one. Sure, you can use tabs, but a dual panel Nautilus would be really useful.

One tool to help you manage your secure shell connections is the GNOME SSHmenu tool. This helpful application adds a small applet to the GNOME panel that allows you to make secure shell connections with a single click.

Here is a collection of gnome panel applets that I have found in the repositories, installed applets can be viewed and added to your gnome panel via right click on an empty panel space then click "Add to Panel"

The Gimmie panel enhancement project has been proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.22. Gimmie provides a highly streamlined user interface that exposes GNOME functionality in a logically organized and consistent manner.

X-tile is a gnome applet for your panel (or optionally a standalone application) that allows you to select a number of windows and tile them in different ways.This is especially useful for comparing products in separate web pages,or for programmers refering to documentation as they are programming.

GNOME is one of the more stable and user-friendly desktops around. And of course, like most of the Linux-verse, with a little tweaking you can make it even more user-friendly. The GNOME panel is one aspect of the GNOME desktop that certainly does not escape possible tweaks.

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area.