Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Sense Hofstede <qense@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 April 2010 22:44, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Hi folks
>
> On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our
> plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu
> by 11.04. <http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/>
>
> Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too.
> <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/347>
>
> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?
>
> Thanks
> - --
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/
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Hello,

The ideas sound great to me! It makes a lot of sense, both from a
design perspective as well as from a user perspective, to have a
single, consistent way to access common tasks.

However, something that I am afraid of is that it might turn out that
this great plan will end up meaning a lot of duplicating work with
regards to GNOME Shell and GNOME 3.0. There are plans for the
notification area and systems in GNOME Shell and they might not be
fully compatible with Ubuntu. Canonical could of course propose to do
the notification part of GNOME 3.0 and make Ayatana a part of it, but
I feel that a lot of people would be very unhappy with that. Remains
tricky business, but I do think that Ubuntu has both the legal and the
moral right to adapt GNOME to its wishes, so if it is decided to use a
heavily modified GNOME version, why not?

The unified notificators would provide a wonderful way to integrate
the user's application of choice in the system. Ubuntu chooses a
default set of applications and of course the system should integrate
with them well. They were chosen for a reason and they are installed
by default, so it makes sense to give integrating them preference over
integrating everything. But I do think that it should be possible to
make other applications the default subjects of the notificators.

Furthermore, users often don't care much what the name of their
application is, they just want the same icon and the same way of
accessing the same type of information. You might have experienced the
panic of some Windows users when the blue 'E' had disappeared from
their desktops: they had started to associate the logo of Internet
Explorer with the Internet.

Considering the two things I mentioned above I think I agree with the
approach used in Indicator Messages, that the best way to implement
the notificators would be by using the category or the type of the
information the notificator is providing access to. This would require
a solid defaults API and this would make the notificators the default
way to access the default application for thing X. Other applications
could use this.

Another advantage is that it would (or could) provide easy access to
default resources. Examples: a download manager or a status menu could
be read and modified by applications wanting to manipulate that
information. The notificators would make sure the rest of the system
would be reached as well and that everything gets nicely integrated
into the system.

Mark already said that DBus has been chosen as the way to communicate.
A very sound decision if you want to allow different applications to
be the default. If they all use the same protocol it's just a matter
of switching address and the default has been changed with the user
noticing it.

I would like to end with saying that I appreciate the effort made my
the Design Team to improve the communication with the rest of the
Ubuntu Community. Writing blog posts and managing discussions like
these cost a lot of time and energy, but it is vital to being listened
to. It would be a shame if this wonderful ideas would end up being
thoroughly disliked by parts of the community just because they feel
the changes are forced upon them, and not necessarily because they
don't agree. Thank you!

Regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də]