unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 00:27 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 17:48 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> >> So to get things started, I'd like to suggest Messaging Menu integrated
> >> into
> >> the systray via the new protocol as an Ayatana objective for Karmic.  To
> >> assist in this effort, another community developer (I'll thank him by
> >> name
> >> after it works) is working on getting KDE trunk (the to be 4.3) running
> >> on
> >> Jaunty via Project Neon.  That should provide a reasonably stable basis
> >> for
> >> Ayatana developers to work with.
> >
> > I think that this isn't a good idea for the messaging indicator.  The
> > principle reason for that is that the spec only deals with the icon not
> > the menu part of the indicator.  If we took the current indicator,
> > ported it to this spec, and then displayed it in KPanel -- the menu
> > would still be a GTK+ menu.  Which is going to look... okay, but not
> > really that great.
> 
> I missed the part where I said I thought you should reuse the current GTK+
> indicator in KDE.  Please don't put words in my mouth. (Thanks Celeste)

Hmm, I guess considering the first I saw of this protocol was on the XDG
list I assumed that you were interested in it for the cross-desktop
usage, and thus one application to run in both desktop environments.
I'm skeptical of why one would want to go through a level of GUI
indirection if you were going to write two versions anyway.

> The indicator needs to be on the taskbar.  Having it outside the systray,
> but on the taskbar is going to look unintegrated and be unpleasant (I
> don't have a battery widget in my taskbar because in KDE 4.2 you can't put
> it in the systray and elsewhere is just too annoying and intrusive to
> contemplate).

I guess I feel that it would need to be in the systray if we wanted it
to be consistent with other things in the systray.  But, correct me if
I'm wrong, there are other things in the KDE panel besides the systray.
It seems like we're more interested in being integrated with those.
Which would mean a plasmoid, not a system tray item, correct?

That all being said, we did implement it as an applet on GNOME, and that
hasn't been completely wonderful.  The problem is that the nature of the
messaging indicator is that it disappears when not in use (which is also
on the table for discussion) and that behavior makes it feel like a
systray item.  So it does feel a little out of place not being in the
systray there.

		--Ted

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