Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 01:58 +0200, Luis Menina 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. 

Actually it's a real pain trying to support "tweakers" and "enthusiasts"
that, for one reason or another, don't have a notification area. A
couple of examples

1. In gnome-disk-utility we put an icon in the notification area
   to tell people that their disks are failing, see

   http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-ata-smart-notification.png
   http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-ata-smart-warning.png

   We also show a libnotify notification pointing to this icon.

   In fact, we don't show this notification if you don't have a
   notification area; I mean, we'd need to reword the libnotify
   notification (make it longer, bad) and also provide buttons to
   get the user to the app showing details.

   In other words, what was previously a clear warning turns into
   something that is pretty close to an UI disaster.

2. For PolicyKit, we want to convey the user that the user is running
   with elevated privileges (so they can throw these privileges away
   if desired). Without a notification area, you obviously won't get
   this icon.

It's not hard to come up with other legitimate examples (package
management for example) of why a notification area is useful.

Anyway, my stance on this is very clear: I will not support users
without a notification area, I'm just not going to add code and mess up
the UI just to support people who don't use a notification area.

(And, FWIW, I'd wish we had a better way in GNOME of providing the
information discussed above to the user - e.g. I'm not saying the
notification area as it is _today_ is very good.. but at least it gets
the job done.)

FWIW, I wholeheartedly agree that lots of people abuse the notification
area. And I'd like to point out that your own application is doing this,
here's a screenshot I did a few weeks ago

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/brasero.png

because the whole user experience was so.. freaking absurd.. and I was
overloaded with redundant information.

     David