Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hey Luis,

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Luis Menina <liberforce freeside fr> wrote:
> Toms a écrit :
>
>> 1) System tray - applets that could end up in system tray, most
>> probably contextually - like, when they are needed or make sense. Or,
>> sometimes per user request in preferences (something like a "show in
>> system tray" checkbox for those marginal "nobody knows" cases). As
>> pointed out[2], KDE has some specs worth considering on the case.
>
> Please, don't try to abuse the system tray for things that should be
> applets. System tray has been made to notify events. One should be able to
> use GNOME without requiring a notification applet. A recent example of
> things gone wrong is the volume controler : it should be an applet an not a
> system tray item, as it presents a permanent state and not an event nor a
> response to an event.

Seems to me you have this almost entirely backwards - you should be
able to use GNOME without applets (though we need GNOME Shell to make
this a reality).  The volume status icon was wrong as an applet.
There are a number of reasons for this that I won't go into here.  The
volume status icon shows you the current status of the system volume.
This is very similar to the power and network status icons.

You seem to be speaking very positively about what does and does not
belong here.  However, it seems to me that while you may be right
about it being useful for notifications you are not recognizing that
it may also be used for status (particularly types of status that
change - where recognizing the change is a form of ... notification).
MSDN has a pretty good reference for how the area is used in Windows:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511448.aspx#rightui

If you follow those rules the volume icon does belong there - and just
to pick an example - the brasero icon does not.

Jon