Re: Feature proposal: combined system status menu

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de> wrote:
> This all looks so ... crowded in the wireframes. So very very
> crowded. That can't be good?

First of all, did you look at the example scenarios?

On my current machine, the user menu has 6 items, with the avatar,
user name and chat status on top. With the new design, I would have 6
items with two sliders on top - so essentially the same thing, yet
without the added complexity of separate menus for volume, network and
power. So actually, the result would be much less crowded and much
cleaner.

> I understand that much of this is not supposed to be shown when not in
> use, but this does open a lot of questions to me. i.e. you have to
> figure out what "in use" means, i.e. for audio you probably have to
> think about some latency after each action that audio is still
> considered in use, and what about the usecase, where I am in a
> presentation at a conference and somebody sends me a video, and i want
> to see it, but want to turn off audio first, so that nobody notices that
> i watch a video rather than watch the speaker?

Audio output is always present. For microphones, there will be no
change from the current volume menu behavour.

> And regarding the
> networking thing: if you want to show the networking bit only when
> traffic is required, then you create a chicken and egg problem, where
> the first network operation of an app will always fail, because you use
> it as a trigger but can't offer the network immeidately yet...

There's no reason why we have to do this in response to actual
attempts to access the network, but I'm not the best person to discuss
that. ;)

> So, I see tons of problems coming up when you try to be "context
> sensitive"... You need a lot of magic where you have to anticipate
> actions of the user before he actually does them. Because the user might
> want to change the volume *before* playing audio, and set up the network
> *before* doing something, and so on and so on...

Again, output volume will always be displayed. Wi-fi will always be
displayed in the menu too - you can always select the entry to reach
the relevant settings panel.

> Also, if this menu shows when we are in airplane mode, and I presumably
> can use it to get out of airplane mode: how do i actually get into
> airplane mode if the option isn't shown then?

Same as now - through the control center.

> But first and foremost, this all looks so crowded. Looks more like some
> feature-loaded KDE menu to me, rather then a minimalistic GNOME menu...

Again, in most cases this will be less crowded than the current version.

Allan