unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 05:17, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The apps should always degrade to older / alternative behaviours. It's a
> bug if they don't, and I'm sorry if the Empathy case was badly handled,
> we should patch things up with upstream :-)
>
> If the category indicator (sound indicator in this case) is not present,
> then AppIndicators or the SysTray (till 11.04 on Ubuntu) are available
> and should be used.
>

Aha, I misunderstood.

If the indicator applet isn't present, it's up to the application to provide
a usable interface via some other method.

I thought this meant that if the indicator applet wasn't present, the
various indicators would show up via the notification-area, transparent
fall-back style. You'd get a messaging menu, a rhythmbox indicator, a
volume-control indicator, all in the notification tray.

Any reason not to do it this way, technical or design-wise? It seems like
that would be a good way to encourage upstream adoption in particular...
desktops that don't want to go full-hog into the indicator desktop
experience can wade in slowly: "Here's a library that makes it easy to put
stuff into the notification tray, with a consistent UI. Oh, and if you
happen to have a more advanced implementation, it can do something cooler,
but through precisely the same protocol!"

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