elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Nishant Agrwal <nishantagrwal12993@xxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, I think you're right. The dock's the correct place to start. How do you feel about losing explicit minimize though? Do you guys think you can live without it?

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:27 AM, Sergey Shnatsel Davidoff <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
2012/9/21 Nishant Agrwal <nishantagrwal12993@xxxxxxxxx>
About applications that want to hide on close, don't they use other mechanisms like for example, a music player would hide to the Sound Menu?

I'll answer with a quote:
In Ubuntu, many programs — Rhythmbox, Banshee, VLC, Pino, and Pidgin, to name just five — put items in the notification area that aren’t notifications at all.
Often this is a substitute for minimizing the window, to avoid cluttering the taskbar. For example VLC’s notification area has a menu with a “Hide VLC media player in taskbar” item, and the AllTray utility exists for people who want “to have a program always running, but easy to put out of the way”. That may make perfect sense to the developers of those individual applications. But looking at the operating system as a whole, it’s crazy. No competent designer, sitting down to design an operating system from scratch, would say to themselves “I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”.
http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/

Also an alternative approach to the problem might be to patch Plank's click behavior to something more useful like switching windows. Just food for thought :) 

I heavily favor this over messing with WM because the latter may break design of existing apps which we're definitely not going to do. For example, we're not converting menubars to AppMenus even though it's technically possible because it will severly break huge apps like Inkscape or GIMP.

-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff
OS architect @ elementary