unity-design team mailing list archive

[Victor <vm.kalbskopf@xxxxxxxxx>]

No, it is not time.

On 5 May 2010 16:38, Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I've been giving this a lot of thought recently, well actually, I've
> been irritated into giving it thought after not being able to find my
> Rhythmbox window. I've been trying to work out why we have "minimize
> to tray" functionality at all and all I can come up with is that it is
> because the window-switcher applet is so horrible.
>
> The window switcher applet has a bunch of problems, mainly that each
> entry takes up too much space, and with an entry for each window you
> fill up the space pretty quickly. When that happens you can't read the
> titles of the windows, so you may have 5 Firefox windows and have to
> hover over all of them to find the right one. You can, of course,
> group them but even then that doesn't really help when each entry
> still takes up a large portion of the space and requires a click to
> access the windows in the group.
>
> It's because of this shortage of space that I believe "minimize to
> tray" exists. Minimize to tray is essentially "I don't need this
> window cluttering up my taskbar, but I need to leave it running" and
> the only reason I can think that normal bog-standard minimize isn't
> suitable here is because the window-switcher is cluttered and the
> window gets in the way.
>
> I've been running DockbarX for a little while now, which groups
> windows by their application icon, and displays a list of windows with
> *full* titles when you hover that icon with the cursor. The massive
> advantage of this is that you can open a hell of a lot of applications
> before you run out of room, in fact right now I have 12 applications
> (even more windows) running and I've not even filled half the panel
> and I'm not on a widescreen resolution either. In this situation
> minimize to tray is:
>
> a.) Effectively the same thing
> b.) A pain to work with because now there are two possible places that
> your window could be minimized to
>
> So, my suggestion is that we remove the minimize to tray functionality
> from the indicator applet for apps outside the messaging menu and
> replace the window-switcher with DockbarX or some other switcher which
> follows a similar principle. I'm not saying DockbarX is ideal, but
> it's a massive improvement on what we have already.
>
> Luke.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana<https://launchpad.net/%7Eayatana>
> Post to     : ayatana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana<https://launchpad.net/%7Eayatana>
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
>