Re: 3rd party application integration guidelines - how to be a good shell citizen?

[Marcel <lists nightsoul org>]

Am 30.04.2011 09:28, schrieb Koppányi Tamás:
>     Yes, but the question remains: How is a headless application
>     represented in GNOME Shell? How does the user send an application to
>     the background, given that the minimize button is gone? Is it
>     really a good idea to go for the inconsistency and just not exit these
>     applications on window close, but send them to the background instead?
>
>
> as a plain user, i'd really love to see some consistency there. the use
> of the close button became sort of a chaos, and now i have to remember
> individually for each application whether the X in the top-right corner
> will actually close it, or just hide it somewhere (i.e. Banshee used to
> close properly, but since it has systemtray/indicator support, it just
> gets hidden). now i am using keyboard shortcuts to manage this, but even
> there i found some inconsistency: some apps close with ctrl+w, some with
> ctrl+q, so the user has to remember individually again for each app how
> to actually shut it down.
> imho, it would be great to have a second button on the titlebar for
> hiding windows. and i don't necessarily mean minimizing here, but it
> would be great to know that the X does close the app, and the other
> button for example can put it on a new workspace, or something. just to
> get it out of sight (so you don't need to go nto activities mode and
> drag&drop it on another workspace). there could be some showing the user
> that the app has been moved to another workspace (like the workspaces
> sidebar showing up, and the app going there with some "minimize" effect).

While reading the last few mails I always had the way OS X does this in 
mind. Picking up the mail client again: Closing it would "minimize" 
(kinda reintroducing that feature) to the dash (!) and indicating 
somehow visually that it is still running. Once there's new mail, there 
could be an indicator (the same one, modified? + a non-persistent 
notification) on the dash icon that communicates that. That could 
emphasize even more the importance of the overview.

I actually like the closing concept OS X uses, one could introduce a 
close option in the top bar's application menu to carry out the headless 
applications concept. Or invent something else here, haven't thought 
this point too thoroughly yet. It would be even nicer to be able to 
serialize an application as said before to save the ram that it used. 
"suspending" applications to swap (?) comes to my mind there, but that 
looks very ambitious :)

Marcel