unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Ayatana,

So as Lucid winds down and UDS is coming like a freight train I thought
it would be a good time to start looking at would could be done in the
Maverick cycle for application indicators.  Here are some of the design
issues that I see have come up in the Lucid cycle that I think need to
be investigated.

Advanced Menu Styling

Some applications are using menus that are more complex than we could
represent in DBusmenu for the Lucid cycle.  While it'd be nice to
support everything possible, I think we're going to be limited to some
subset of that.  The trick is to determine the subset.  I think that it
makes sense to target applications in Ubuntu's Main repository first,
and make sure we can handle the menu items they need to be complete.

The most glaring one to me is Tomboy's pins for notes.  What are some
others?  (a screen shot and a description of functionality would be
helpful)  What problems are they trying to solve that can't be done with
standard menu items?

Custom Icons

For application indicators we're currently only taking icon names for
the icons.  This allows for consistent theming of the icons along with
the panel theme.  The problem that this creates is when dealing with
dynamically generated icons.  There are several applications that abuse
this (Bacula comes to mind) but applications like GNOME Settings Daemon
uses this for the current keyboard layout (putting two letters of text
as the icon).  I'd prefer to avoid sending all the theme information and
update signals required to implement drawing of the icon to the
application.  Is there another way that we can provide dynamic icons?

Quick Lookup Information

Applications have previously have made some information quickly
available by using a tooltip on the icon.  While I don't wish to start
the tooltip discussion again, what I'm curious about is we can't find a
solution for this information that isn't a tooltip.  Does some sort of
standard menu item help?  Could we put it somewhere else?

    Thanks,
        Ted

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