Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[Luis Menina <liberforce freeside fr>]

William Jon McCann a écrit :
> 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.

Which are wrong too, thank you. We need differenciate *states* (volume, 
wifi signal quality, battery charge) from *events*.

One problem for example with the volume controller as a status icon is 
that I'm now unable to put it where I want in the panel. I used to have 
the sound applet on the top right corner, with the clock applet just on 
its left. That way I could throw the mouse quickly there and use the 
scroll wheel to change the volume.

Now I can't have things where I want:

1. The notification area is indivisible. You get all the icons or none, 
you can't put one icon in one corner and another one far from it, 
they're always grouped within the notification applet.
2. You can't even order the icons within the notification area, which 
means I can't even make sure the sound icon sticks at the right of the 
notification area.
3. Even if I put the whole notification area in the corner, with the 
sound icon in the top right corner, using the mouse wheel at the top 
right corner won't work. Which means that any icon in the notification 
area lost the ability to use these great and infinitely big zones of my 
desktop (according to Fitts's law).

I agree that my original post wasn't about GNOME 3 because I don't know 
enough where we are going to give a sensible opinion about what could be 
done on this front.

But what I'm almost sure is that *states* and *events* (notifications) 
should be separed.

> 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).

A status is a state. For a network disconnection, the status is 
"disconnected", while the notification will talk about a disconnection 
event. Notification area should be optional, because if you have 
something to show you the state, you can check by yourself what happened.

> MSDN has a pretty good reference for how the area is used in Windows:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511448.aspx#rightui

Excuse me but an environment that shows tens of these just right after 
startup, most of them for stuff that the user doesn't even care can't 
really be treated as an example to copy. Notification area on Windows 
makes me puke. Really. Because their spec has been understood by most 
third party programmers as "every f*cking running app should have a 
status icon". Which is broken. This stuff should be *opt-in*, and not 
*opt-out*.

If I want the battery state, I can go in the power manager and choose if 
I'll have an icon for that (which is good), even if it's currently in 
the notification area (which is bad). The good thing would be to be able 
to add an applet to have battery *state*, while having notifications to 
when "battery is almost discharged". Note that I say "applet", but this 
could be a widget/desklet/plasmoid/whatever : just a place to put states 
stuff.

Excuse me if I sound a little harsh, but this issue has been pissing me 
off for quite a while now, and I see it nowhere to be resolved soon...