Re: [Ayatana] Windicators

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Window indicators, or windicators, are menus that appear at the trailing end of a window’s title bar, or in the panel when the window is maximized. Application developers can use windicators for reflecting status, and allowing change of status, for the item or items presented in the window. The menus should be implemented using DbusMenu.

So far, these just seem to be menus, but with an optional icon instead of text. So I have to ask: Why don't these belong in the regular application menu bar?

As a related question, since we'll be moving the menubar around anyways (into the panel for netbook distributions):

Why not just pick up the entire menu bar and put it into the title bar? Especially if all the menu entries of optional icons anyways, these should be very usable there. If there's lots of menu entries (which there generally shouldn't be anyways), they can always be represented differently (with a '...' or 'down-arrow'  entry that shows the rest of the menu entries, as is currently done for toolbars). You could show menu entries with icons (windicators) first, since they're probably the best thought through and most relevent.

This would perhaps be the only scenario I could imagine CSD being really interesting...  plus it gives us a natural fall-back when CSD isn't available in the window manager: just use the ordinary menu bar. 

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Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx =-