unity-design team mailing list archive

[Gavin Langdon <puttabutta@xxxxxxxxx>]

It sounds nice, but can we trust third party developers to adhere to
ettiquette with their application? I don't think so myself. Dropbox is an
example, where despite numerous requests on their forums for a Lucid /
Karmic complimenting icon go unanswered. There is also no option to remove
the icon from the system tray. A Gnome 3 developer (sorry, I forget her
name) wants to eliminate this kind of marketing on the users desktop with
the new release. I think if there is a new system implemented, third party
apps should not be allowed to do anything they want with your desktop. I
don't think it's extreme to call this unnecessary display of brand 'desktop
spamming'.
Jarlath

I don't think a standard shouldn't be adopted just because of the chance
that an application won't use it properly. There are plenty of
badly-designed UI's for applications--that doesn't mean that UI's should
remove features to keep all applications consistent. Sure, there are bound
to be ugly or badly-implemented applications but that's a fault of the
developer of the app rather than the framework.

If you get rid of the system tray entirely and don't add anything to the
taskbar, you're missing a lot of functionality. Personally I don't think
third party apps like dropbox that aren't officially supported should be
worried about. If people install third party stuff they should know that
they aren't going to get an entirely integrated experience (And if the app
is open source, which it will generally be, it should improve its
integration over time in any case).

I made a little mockup, attached. The applications displayed are only
an example, thought up / stolen by me in 5 minutes.


Yes, that's basically the sort of thing I was thinking. Of course, the
buttons should be all the same size for consistency, and I think action
widgets should only be allowed in the popup that appears rather than in the
button. This way, the taskbar is only used to provide persistent
notifications for the apps unless it's moused over, and this reduces widget
clutter and accidental widget presses when a focus event was intended.

I'll see if I can whip up a mockup of my idea sometime soon.