On Thu, 2009-12-24 at 16:18 -0200, Conscious User wrote: > 1 - Application indicators optional by design. > > The goals of application indicators are very ambitious, as > they replace the systray as we know it today. With that in > mind, I see them as a very good opportunity to solve a > problem that has been plaguing the Desktop for years: > applications shoving tray icons down our throats. > > Unless the application resides *only* in the tray (e.g. > nm-applet), I firmly believe a tray icon should be > optional. If your application needs a tray icon to work > properly, you are doing it wrong. > > So I believe it would be very interesting if, by design, > any application using libappindicator could be placed > or removed from the tray according to the wishes of the > user. I believe "not forcing" should be even a part of > the spec. I'd support this as a design goal, but I don't think that it's something we could enforce on the library side of things. The only thing I think we could do is allow users to block particular applications like Win7 does. But, personally, I think that's a hack that's caused by closed source software -- MS can't fix things, and so they have to block it at the tray level. We can fix it, and I think we should :) > 2 - Evolution and Ayatana > > Seeing in the comments in > https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-indicator/+bug/353007 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-indicator/+bug/460483 > I'm starting to wonder whether the goals of Ayatana are > being limited by the Evolution plugin API. For example, > it is difficult to pass message header information to > notifications or implement close-to-tray functionality. > > Being a faithful Evolution user, I never entered the > "Thunderbird by default" bandwagon, but from an Ayatana > perspective, Thunderbird's friendliness to extensions > look very attractive. Of course, it creates a whole new > set of problems such as integration with panel clock... Yes, I'd say that the Evolution API is limiting some things. I'm not a Thunderbird fan, but I'd be more than happy to help anyone wanting to try and write a libindicate extension for it. > 3 - Raising awareness > > Reading the Ubuntu forums, I noticed two interesting > things. One: a lot of people have no idea of the rationale > behind certain Ayatana decisions (e.g. the new bubble > position in Karmic, how the indicator-applet works, etc.). > Two: once explained, a lot of those people like the ideas. > > I believe it is important to think about some kind of > systematic and efficient way of make users aware of what > has changed and is being experimented during the alphas. > It would, at the very least, reduce the number of "the > notification bubble seems lower than it should" bug reports. Yeah, we've been thinking about this a lot. One of the things that the Canonical Design team is talking about is a shared blog. I like that, but I have a hard enough time writing on my own blog :( I'm not sure if there's some way that this could be a way to work in a collaborative way? Perhaps "official" wiki entries that start out and are discussed on this list? I think that someone reading this probably has a good idea, please reply :) --Ted
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