elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxxxx>]

As an early supporter and still frequent user of the Messaging Menu,
I want to reply to some of the points raised here. It is particular to take
the following into consideration:

1) Whether you intend to support the concept of hiding windows.

Shnatsel said it's a poor copy of the dock, but I personally differentiate
between "foreground" applications that are part of my current workflow
(be it programming, fooling around or preparing lectures) with
"background" applications that run indepedently of which workflow I'm
currently on.

I like to include the former on the dock, but not the latter. Background
apps in the dock clutter it, making task switching harder and slower.
Also, badges in the middle of large colored icons are much less efficient
in attracting my attention. Specially because dock icons are moving targets.

All apps in my Messaging Menu use hide-on-close. I personally think the MM
works very well with those. Unfortunately not all of them (ex: Thunderbird)
do that by default and I need to either hack them or use extensions to
allow them to do that. Which brings to my next point:

2) The difference between a concept inherent to the Messaging Menu
and a specific application doing it wrong.

I think the reputation of the MM was somewhat tarnished by applications
that didn't use it properly (including Canonical-supported ones). Granted,
libindicate is somewhat to blame for allowing those to happen in the
first place, but sometimes it's worthy imagining what an application could
do with the MM, instead of what it currently does.

Satchitb mentioned that emails are less urgent than IMs. This is probably
true in the general case, but when you use the TB integration for a long
time, you notice that it's not as dumb as it seems at a first glance: it 
does
not lit the envelop if the email was sent to a mailing list of you were just
CCed. And does not change the MM at all if the message did not arrive
in the main inbox. So this property plus a good combination of filters
restrict the MM to alerting me when I received a direct, personal email.
And I can't be the only one who once had a boss who used emails for
instant communication simply because he never bothered to learn
something else, for example.

Also worth mentioning is that several app developers do not bother to
implement little details that make MM integration much more usable,
such as unliting the envelope when the proper window/tab is focused
like Empathy does.

Cheers,
-c


Em 29-08-2012 13:41, Daniel Foré escreveu:
> Hey guys,
>
> Just a quick question: does anyone use the messaging menu? If so, what for?
>
> If not, should we consider not shipping it?
>
> Best Regards,
> Daniel Foré