unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

Under the light of the Christmas spirit, I'd like to kickoff
some discussions I was thinking about for a long time now.
Hopefully you'll pick up at least some of them. :)


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.


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...


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.



Merry Christmas to all!