unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Mark Shuttleworth wrote on 16/05/10 17:49:
>...
> 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 think we should clearly distinguish between applications, which have
windows as their primary interface, and services, which do not.

In this model, VLC would be an application. When it has at least
one window open, it is running. When it does not have a window open, it
is not running. It should not have an item in the panel.

Ubuntu One, on the other hand, would be a service. It has a control
panel window, but that window is not usually open. Usually the program
is just sitting running quietly in its status menu.

> 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),

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoundMenu#compliance>: "A compliant player
should also keep playing if you close its window while it is playing;
exit if you close its window while it is not playing; and remember exact
state across sessions, so that after exit and relaunch it is as if the
player had never exited."

This is because the existence of the sound menu implies that music is a
service, as opposed to music players being applications. Therefore you
shouldn't have to care whether a music player is running, just whether
it is playing.

>                     but I'm a bit uncomfortable with that myself,
> because I'm not sure what the IM analogy would be.

The existence of IM status items in the Me menu suggests that IM is a
service. It seems as though you can be Offline, and choose a status to
go online, without launching an IM client explicitly. Unfortunately, it
doesn't yet work that way; all the status items are disabled until you
launch an IM client elsewhere (e.g. from the messaging menu).

> 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.
>...

One of the dozens of simplifications that the iPad made, relative to
Windows and especially Mac OS X, is that you do not have to learn about
switching, minimizing, hiding (in Mac OS X), closing, and quitting as
five separate actions. All five of them are merged into switching. I'm
more interested in how Ubuntu could merge some of those too, than in
reinventing two different ways of minimizing.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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