Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[Martin Meyer <elreydetodo gmail com>]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Gravis <desktop-devel adaptivetime com> wrote:
> 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 agree that there is a difference between programs which are
iconified and actual system status-type icons. I also agree that this
proposal is probably the easiest migration path - basically to move
all the real system stuff somewhere else (which will be new) and leave
the apps in the current place.

One additional suggestion: why not make a new "status icons applet"
which can show either "Iconified Applications" or "System Notification
Icons" or both? That way the user can chose to separate them or chose
to combine them all. They could also show both sets in different
instances of the applet and locate them in different parts of the
panel.

> 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>
>
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