unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Sorry I broke threading on this... gmail really doesn't want to reply to
the list....)

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 16:57, Martin Albisetti <
martin.albisetti@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Jeremy Nickurak wrote:
>
>> Right. I also wouldn't expect the user to know the difference between a
>> program that's running and a program that has a launcher by looking at the
>> messaging menu (at least without it saying "Launch: Evolution", which it
>> currently doesn't.
>>
>
> Super, I think we're mostly in agreement. We need to figure out how to
> represent this better.
>
>
>
>     Yes, this may be a good idea so we can guarantee a certain level of
>>    sanity with our default applications (or the ones we have in our
>> repos).
>>    I'm not sure if that should be tackled as a whitelist/blacklist
>>    approach or patches against upstream packages though.
>>
>>  This can't be done upstream, and it can't be done automatically in the
>> package. It depends entirely on which applications the user actually uses.
>>
>> If I never use Evolution, but another user on the system does, he/she
>> should see Evolution in his messaging menu. I shouldn't. Given enough
>> applications with indicator support (which I'm really hoping happens), this
>> is the only condition in which I think we can call the indicator menu
>> useful.
>>
>
> I don't use evolution either, and it's always there as well.
> Maybe we can decide to show it or not based on what your default email
> client is?
> While we may not be able to do the work for all email apps to work well in
> the messaging menu, we can at least not show Evolution if I say my default
> email client is Thunderbird.
>

What if my default email client is firefox? Gmail and other web-based mail
is a huge deal. What if it's just a mail notification client like cgmail or
gmail-notify?

What about IRC clients?

What about IM clients?

What about blog clients?

What about microblog clients?

What if I use more than one Mail/IRC/IM/Blog client? What if one client does
more than one thing?

What about all the indicator-using cases we haven't thought of yet?

Do we need a dialog to select the prefered email for each one of these? Or
should we just try to fix the problem at the source?

How about this: Programs that are supposed to run all the time:
- start on login
- are hard to close unless you really want to (Think empathy's approach of
"hiding" when you actually hit the close button, or just a warning dialog
- may restart automatically if they crash

If that's true, nobody ever has to worry about launching anything, or worry
about what's running or what's not, because the things that are supposed to
be running are always running.

Then the messaging menu is simple: It only displays messaging for things
that are actually in use. No need for extra preference dialogs, whitelists
and blacklists, or deep/spooky knowledge on the part of the user. Everything
just works.