Re: [Usability]Re: Notification Area guidelines

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 10:20:22PM -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 20:55, Evan Martin wrote:
> > Well, there is a rationalization, sorta: you really are closing the window,
> > in that it's not visible anymore and it's not in the standard list of
> > minimized windows.  The difference here is that you intend to get rid of
> > the window and not the application.

Overloading minimize or close isn't very intuitiv IMHO, but if it is done 
consistently if i easy to get used to it (at least for people like most of 
the people developing GNOME ;-))

> >
> > So I could imagine someone becoming equally confused by your proposed
> > behavior: they'll click the minimize button and the window will suddenly
> > disappear from the window list (which any casual user likely thinks of
> > as a task list).
> > 
> > I'm not suggesting that close-hides behavior is better; I'm just pointing
> > out that it's not as cut-and-dry as you might think.
> 
> I just implemented having clicking on the tray icon do iconify/present
> (to handle multiple workspaces), and I have to say that close-hides is
> the better behaviour for at least the IM instance. In most cases where
> it is an application which is putting a status icon in the window, you
> want to hide the main window when you click the close button on the
> titlebar, as you don't want it in the windowlist any longer. So, if the
> tray icon is embedded, clicking close should gtk_widget_hide () the main
> window, and if the icon is not embedded, it should exit the application.
> I think standardizing on something like this is the best way to go. It
> just seems to be the right thing to do.
> 

Another approach with less surprise, but a bit harder to discover would be 
to make the notification icon a toggle to hide/unhide the window. But that 
has the downside that behaviour in case that the window is not hidden but 
totally obscured by other windows get quite hard to get right. (Well now 
as i think about it, it is just like the 'feature' of the tasklist applet 
to minimize active windows if the user clicks on it in the tasklist. And 
that was quite annoying, so i patched it away in my version)

I think most options have downside. So I'd say the most importent 
requirement should be consistency among all programms (that *includes* KDE 
and independent software).


Martin H.