How to get a list of all app. icons and commands to run these apps?

[McLightning]

hi everybody
im thinking about making a menu app for maemo devices with python
i could get a list of some icons from the folder usr/share/pixmaps
but i guess all icons are not there
briefly what i need is some kind of a code snippet to get a list of installed apps and their icons like personal launcher do in its setting menu
i hope you understand what i mean
:) i'll be waiting for your helps

[Matan]

Installed application that are meant to run from launcher have a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/hildon/ directory. You can parse those files, which include then name of the executable.

[qwerty12]

You can use Glib's GKeyFile stuff to parse a desktop file.

I imagine Personal Launcher and Personal Menu have code for doing this, along with hildon-desktop itself.