unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My comments below are written from the perspective of Unity, because (a)
that's what I'm running, and (b) that's where our design conversations
can have the most immediate impact.

On 16/05/10 15:30, Sense Hofstede wrote:
> An application bucket where you can dump applications you don't want
> to take space sounds like a neat idea. The applications could stay in
> there, even when they're running and have got the focus -- this could
> be indicated by placing the focus triangle at the bucket icon (the
> bucket icon is distinct from application by a different background
> colour or a border around its icon (what icon?)).

The Unity Launcher shows running applications.

If the app fits one of the Category Indicators, like the Messaging Menu
or Sound Menu, it may also show as "running" there, with the same
visualization (currently, a little triangle).

I think it's reasonable to have apps which *don't* show in the Launcher,
but are still running. I'd like to hear from MPT, cc'd, on the subject.

I'm not sure if it's worth making that an explicit configuration option
(those cost a knuckle at least, remember ;-)). I've seen spec's from MPT
where that behavior is sometimes implicit (you close a music player
window, and it keeps running in the background *if a song was playing*
but not otherwise), but I'm a bit uncomfortable with that myself,
because I'm not sure what the IM analogy would be.

But I would object to a *third* catch-all place where windows might
"sometimes go", which is how I interpret your "application bucket". The
launcher is basically that bucket already, and Category Indicators
should suffice for things which are running but which we consider more
like "services" than applications; we don't need a third place as well.

Mark

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