Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[Gravis <desktop-devel adaptivetime com>]

It seems to me that there are few warring ideas here about the system
tray/notification area/status notification area usage.

1) anything goes
2) programs information/icons only
3) system information/icons only

Simply put, programs have dominated this area on Gnome and every other
desktop environment for eons.  The only solution I can think that would
solve this conundrum is to have two separate "notification area"
applets.

I dont like seeing icons I dont care about when I look at the
notification area to mess with application but I do still want to be
able to see this information with ease.  Two areas would solve this by
letting me put the system info applet with battery status/audio
volume/bluetooth status/wifi availability/etc in the upper left (like my
cell phone) while still being able to have my iconified applications
together like I want them.

In short, rename the current area to something like "Program Status
Area" and make a new one like "System Status Area".

Doing this would require changing some existing system apps for Gnome
but would prevent having to trying to force an onslaught of developers
to change how they do things which would likely cause an even larger
schism between Gnome/KDE/etc desktop fans/developers when a GTK app will
not longer show it's icon in the "notification area" in KDE/etc.


On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 18:45 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Yes I think we first need to acknowledge that this area is not a
> notification area today.  Then for 3.0 we should make sure we figure
> out how better to present notifications to the user and improve our
> existing status area.  It will be interesting to see how the Ubuntu
> experiments here work out... or if they'll be useful to adopt upstream
> at all.
> 
> Jon


-- 
Gravis <desktop-devel adaptivetime com>