unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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