Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Robin Anderson <afisynte@xxxxxxxxx>]

One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at least the past several releases, has only had two workspaces on by default so I take it there isn't much of a focus to get average users (read: users that don't change default settings) to use them, but they are quite useful and I'd go so far as to compare them to how a person feels after using a dual monitor setup for a little while compared to always using a single monitor.

The post does mention "We will be working on ways for long-running applications to be less obtrusive when their windows are minimized" which made me think of how Chrome / Chromium uses pinned tabs and so now I'm wondering if the design team or other Ubuntu developers eventually want to have Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Ubuntu Desktop converge and maybe perhaps have a Chrome-OS-like tab windowing setup. Personally, I'd very much like to stick to a standard Window List for Desktop usage, but I would be curious what the Design Team's plans are in this area.

One can set the option Always on Visible Workspace from the right click menu on a window in the window list but directly against the statement "“I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”" from the blog post, the usage of icons in the notification area is different in the major *always on available workspace place* way. As the notification area gets phased out, I would hope there's at least some thought put into a Gnome applet (with D-Bus stuff for KDE and other DEs) for a place separate from the Window List to minimize applications to be visible on all workspaces. Or at least standards are kept so Gnome or another DE could be configured to use current applications with the 'visible on all workspaces' minimizing feature could be used (or re-enabled in the case of Ubuntu's Gnome).

Thanks for reading.