Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it>]

2009/5/15 William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>:
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Luis Menina <liberforce freeside fr> wrote:
>>
>> 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.

William, please note that *currently* we have a Notification Area and
GNOME HIG speaks about notification icons, so IMHO Luis is right: by
now the volume icon (while it calls itself applet) in Notification
Area is, strictly speking, wrong because, as you say, it represents a
*status*, not a *notification*.

So the interesting question now is: what for GNOME 3.0? do we want to
keep the "Notification Area" (then we need another solution to show
current status of some stuff, like battery, network, audio input and
output volume...) or we want to use this area for as "Status Ares"
(then we need another solution to show notifications like new email,
new IM message, new updates[1]...)?
A different approach for notifications was proposed here[2] and
something similar is going to implemented here[3].

In suborder, another interesting question is: how could GNOME Desktop
prevents applications to mis-use the Notification/Status area? By now
we are providing gtk_staus_icon_*() functions and usage policies on
HIG, but this wasn't enough to avoid bad usage.

[1] while the difference between notification and status seems ephimeral, here
[2] http://live.gnome.org/AlternativeNotificationsUI
[3] https://launchpad.net/indicator-applet