unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 01:14, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> To me, it's not about time-to-load. It's about the fact that you want to
> know about new tweets even if you are not actively using  Gwibber. If
> you are actively using it, you want  the window. If not, you just want
> the notifications.


Quite so, however I think the issue is having an effective and consistent UI
for quickly switching back and forth between these two states. This is where
the messaging menu falls quite a bit behind the old minimize-to-tray
behavior: Switching states with the notification area requires a click and
no inertia change to go from the active->inactive gesture to the
inactive->active gesture. The messaging menu requires:

For inactive->active:
- Moving to the panel
- Clicking the messaging menu
- Moving to the correct entry
- Clicking it

For active->inactive:
- Moving to the application's close button
- Clicking

This is both a more complicated process, but more importantly, a more
inconsistent one, since the processes to show and hide the windows have
virtually nothing in common.

That said, I'm not sure if the application bucket is the right solution to
this. This interaction is precisely how the task list works, however:

- The notification area is nice because it's (hopefully) for commonly used
applications
- The notication area shows icons, which visually can be scanned much
faster, and take up much less space on the panel than a text-based task-bar
- The notification area typically has only one icon for the entire
application, whereas each window in a multi-window application shows up in
the task bar
- The notification area icons show up regardless of what workspace you're
on, whereas the task bar only shows the current workspace's tasks

In a perfect world then, the task bar would provide a way for a window to
be:
- Sticky when minimized
- Icon-only, without text
- "Favorited", so it shows up based on the above rules.

That doesn't sound too complicated implementation-wise, but (for me) would
make the behavior of these "toggled" applications much more consistent with
the regular task-manager UI.


-- 
Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx =-