unity-design team mailing list archive

[Chow Loong Jin <hyperair@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In Ubuntu 11.04, Unity has effectively removed notification area support for
almost everything but a few exceptions, which are maintained in a whitelist
specified in dconf.

I'm not exactly sure why this happened, but I'm thinking that it's something
along the lines of forcing all applications to move to the new and improved
indicators.

This actually got me thinking.. rather than hiding the icons of the applications
not in the whitelist, how about emulating indicators for them? Disclaimer: I
don't know if this idea has been brought up before, so if it has, please point
me in the right direction.

I haven't actually given much thought to the implementation, so I don't actually
know how hard it is to implement, if it's even possible, but design-wise, it
could be something like taking the context menu from the notification area icon
and using that as the emulated indicator's menu, and add an extra entry to the
top of the menu for launching the application.

I think something like that would work for the majority of the indicator-less
applications, including our venerable Skype notification area icon that sits in
the whitelist. And this would surely be a step up from the current state of not
being able to interact with windows that minimize themselves to the notification
area, only to disappear completely since the notification area icon wasn't
whitelisted.

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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