elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Nishant George Agrwal <nishantagrwal12993@xxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, so the thread about Noise not complying to the HIG turned into 
quite a general discussion about the HIG and background application 
behaviour so I am creating this new thread with a better title to 
continue it. Here's a link to the old thread:
https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-community/msg02046.html

Summing up, we need to think about proper ways to create and deal with 
background applications, i.e, applications that don't require 
interaction with the user for most or a big part of the time they are 
running, like mail clients, IM clients, music players, microblogging 
apps, etc. Typically, these apps don't fit well into any one task the 
user is performing, so it often doesn't make sense for these 
applications to be bound to a particular workspace either.

To this end, applications are to intelligently handle closing the 
window to do whatever best suits the situation. The following could be 
guidelines to what the app must do (this deals with the user-facing 
elements, not the implementation)

"If you'd check a specific application frequently but not in reaction 
to notifications it raises (e.g. group chat, even if you weren't pinged 
directly) or if it has to be accessible as quickly as possible while 
it's running (e.g. music player, to pause music), the app should 
display an icon in the dock while it's running.
If the app is primarily brought up in reaction to a notification and if 
the state of the app doesn't significantly affect its usage frequency 
(e.g. microblogging client - if the user tweets often they'd pin it to 
dock anyway), it should display an icon in the dock only when there are 
unattended action items (e.g. new messages) along with the action item 
count in the dock badge."

As far as implementation goes, this branch was recently merged into 
plank, which enables preliminary support for batches and progress bars 
without the need for an open window.
https://code.launchpad.net/~ricotz/plank/launcherentry-items
For hiding the window while keeping the dock icon visible, one solution 
would be to make better use of minimize. The following blueprint would 
need to be implemented:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/gala/+spec/minimized-as-closed

That's all folks.