Re: [Ayatana] System / hardware indicator

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott Kitterman wrote:

Ted Gould has been a proponent of a system / hardware indicator, and
I've been working on how to handle things like USB-unmount and
Bluetooth-connect and am coming round to the idea. What do you guys
think? If there's support for the idea, we could do a round of design
work and present it here for more detailed discussion.

    

I think this would have a strong potential to be useful.  Shortly before
UDS, I looked through the systray and sytray like items I had and
concluded I'd like to see most of the system/hardware icons abstracted
away into something that would let me know when I'm required to care:

http://www.kitterman.org/ScottK/2009/05/system_indicator.html
  

"When to care" is very difficult to gauge. For example, if you are advertising yourself on Bluetooth publicly, but don't know it, then it is something you might care about. If you intended that, then reminding you of it all the time is just irritating. There are a lot of devices on the USB bus that are built-in, and there are some that just show up when you attach them. Figuring out how to present fairly complex info in a clean, lightweight, discoverable and useful way is a very hard problem, imo, but possibly worthwhile to explore.

Mark

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