unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

> Well, I don't think that's the question at all. We already have a
> near-optimal solution to this in sticking the old-style notification
> area alongside the new indicator applet. An optimal one would be some
> kind of indicator that gave good UX and integrated nicely with the
> indicator applet. 

> The question is more, "how can we fix this to provide the best user
> experience?", rather than than "how many people will be affected by us
> implementing a bad user experience (moving to a window)?" We should be
> trying to improve the situation, not make it worse for the people that
> do use Wine and Java apps.


Wait, I think you and Jeremy are missing my point. I'm not proposing a
separate window or a "Wine indicator" as an attempt to get rid of the
notification area at all costs, even when it's the best possible
solution. It's quite the opposite: I do *not* believe it's the best
possible solution and I proposed the previous mockup because I think it
can be an *improvement* over it.

My previous post referred to the fact that the inability to patch Wine
applications makes impossible to have an optimal solution (using
libappindicator), so we *will* end up with a sub-optimal one. That does
not mean that *any* sub-optimal solution, like keeping the current
notification area, is equally acceptable. Some sub-optimal solutions are
better than others.

How? I'm not entirely sure and it's open for discussion. But here's a
small random example: one of the problems with the notification area is
that there is not a single, uniform system for keyboard shortcuts. With
indicators, you can have a single shortcut for accessing the
indicator-applet menu and navigate with arrows from there.

Now, pushing wine icons inside a "Wine indicator" wouldn't completely
get rid of the problem, but would allow us to have some sort of standard
like: inside the Wine indicator, we can navigate through the tray icons
there with the arrow keys and key Z simulates left-click, key X
simulates middle-click and key C simulates right-click.

Not the best possible example in the world, I know, but hopefully it
illustrates my point. :)