On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 05:17, Mark Shuttleworth
<mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The apps should always degrade to older / alternative behaviours. It's a
bug if they don't, and I'm sorry if the Empathy case was badly handled,
we should patch things up with upstream :-)
If the category indicator (sound indicator in this case) is not present,
then AppIndicators or the SysTray (till 11.04 on Ubuntu) are available
and should be used.
Aha, I misunderstood.
If the indicator applet isn't present, it's up to the application to provide a usable interface via some other method.
I thought this meant that if the indicator applet wasn't present, the various indicators would show up via the notification-area, transparent fall-back style. You'd get a messaging menu, a rhythmbox indicator, a volume-control indicator, all in the notification tray.
Any reason not to do it this way, technical or design-wise? It seems like that would be a good way to encourage upstream adoption in particular... desktops that don't want to go full-hog into the indicator desktop experience can wade in slowly: "Here's a library that makes it easy to put stuff into the notification tray, with a consistent UI. Oh, and if you happen to have a more advanced implementation, it can do something cooler, but through precisely the same protocol!"