Re: application indicators

[Nathaniel McCallum <nathaniel natemccallum com>]

On 02/19/2010 08:23 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Nathaniel McCallum wrote on 19/02/10 07:39:
> > ...
> > I'd like to take the opportunity to talk about apps that may not fit
> > the AppInd model.
>
> We have two basic goals here in replacing the notification area:
>
> 1.  Make interaction with panel items more consistent. Clean up the
>      swamp where some items behave like buttons, some disappear when you
>      click them, some open menus on left click, some open menus on right
>      click, none of the items opening menus highlight like real menu
>      titles do, etc. Achieving this is relatively easy: just make
>      everything a menu.
>
> 2.  Reduce the number of panel items, period. Establish a culture where
>      developers choose to add a panel item less often than they do now.
>      Achieving this is harder, especially in the short term -- because if
>      we succeed, some existing programs that have been in the panel won't
>      be there any more. Some of those panel items might even have been
>      pretty handy. But the overall goal is bigger than they are.
>
> > I agree this is an area of much needed clean-up, so I appreciate the
> > work. Unfortunately, I'm also the developer of Zapplet
> > (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zapplet/) which I suspect doesn't
> > cleanly fit the AppInd model.  Zapplet provides notifications for
> > Zenoss (http://www.zenoss.com<http://www.zenoss.com/>) events.  When
> > an event shows up in Zenoss, Zapplet displays a notification for this
> > server.  Clicking on the notification icon brings up a window near the
> > notification icon where someone can view all outstanding events and
> > modify them easily without having to go to a browser.  See the
> > attached photo for an example of the status icon.  See
> > https://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=244523 for
> > more screenshots.
>
> You're right: this does not fit the everything-is-a-menu model. It looks
> like a window that happens to be hanging off the panel. ;-)
>
> > Currently we generate a StatusIcon on the fly by rendering into a
> > pixbuf.  This icon contains the color of the highest event severity
> > and the number of events of this severity.  Using the AppInd model, we
> > would be required to generate roughly 5k icons just for this display
> > (5 status colors x numbers 0-999).
>
> Even if Zapplet shouldn't be in the panel, there are other items (e.g.
> keyboard layout) that need to use text in their titles. Perhaps that
> should be added to the API.
>
> > We also have the problem of event storms (100s of events).  Rendering
> > events in a TreeView allows us to show lots of data in an easy,
> > scrollable way.  Using the AppInd model, we'd be required to have a
> > menu, which is entirely unwieldy for events as a whole.  This is true
> > for a number of reasons:
> >    1. Menus with 100s of rows (events) suck
> >    2. Events show a bunch of data (severity, count, hostname,
> > component, summary, first time, last time, etc).  I can't really fit
> > this crucial info in a single menu item.
> >    3. With a menu I can't perform actions on multiple events
> > simultaneously.  This is a critical feature.
> >    4. Menu's can't perform sorting (for instance if I wanted to sort
> > based on event time)
>
> Yeah, that really would work better as a window than as a menu. We're
> experimenting with adding simple controls to menus (for example, Ubuntu
> Lucid's new sound menu has an embedded slider, and the "Me menu" has an
> embedded text field), but we almost certainly wouldn't add something as
> complex as a treeview.

So to summarize (to make sure I got this right):
1. Zapplet should be a window.  I agree with this.  This was largely a 
proof of concept and I decided a long time ago that the move to a window 
was the correct one (if for no other reason that the current design has 
problems on win32).
2. Zapplet should not be in the application tray.  This one is tougher. 
 How is the user to know that new events have arrived?  A notification 
is inadequate since if the user misses the notification he/she has no 
indication that events are waiting for action.  For critical events, 
this is an essential feature.  If an AppInd is created, pop-ing up a 
menu just to open a window seems like a waste of clicks.  Further, how 
can this be done in a cross platform (Win/Mac/Lin) way?

Nathaniel