Re: GNOME 3.0 - shell and applets

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le vendredi 15 mai 2009 à 01:58 +0200, Luis Menina a écrit :
> 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. 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.
> 
>  From 
> http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/desktop-notification-area.html.en 
> 
> "The utility of the notification area decreases rapidly when more than 
> about four icons are always present. For this reason, icons that appear 
> only temporarily in response to events are preferable."

As a side note, another reason developers are currently abusing
notification area is that is it the only cross-desktop
(GNOME/KDE/LXDE/XFCE/IceWM/insert_your_favorite_de_here) way to get
"applets-like" icons on a Xorg system, which also have the nice pro to
not pull something as ugly as bonobo in the loop.

So, if we really want to improve the situation for GNOME 3, we should
also try to solve this cross-desktop "missing" API for applets.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva