unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Chow Loong Jin wrote on 02/05/11 19:07:
>
> 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.

Yes. <http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/>

> 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.
>...

As I understand it, an external process (such as Unity's menu bar) has
no way of knowing what kinds of interaction a notification area item
will respond to. Without actually triggering those events, there's no
programmatic way to predict what it will do when hovered over, when
clicked, when double-clicked, when right-clicked, or when dragged.

So there is no "context menu from the notification area icon" in any
parseable place. Rather, when a notification area icon is right-clicked,
it sometimes runs some code that happens to open a menu nearby.

- -- 
mpt
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