Re: I believe we should reconsider our sys-tray removal

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Hi Britt,

Just commenting on the parts I have answers to...

Britt Yazel <bwyazel gnome org> wrote:
...
> 2) Back in early GNOME3 we had the slide up tray from the bottom. Am I the only one who thought that was 
> super cool? It had nice big icons for touch and accessibility purposes, and it was just really cool looking 
> imo. I was sad when that went away for usability reasons. Is there any chance on resurrecting that and 
> polishing it's usability issues as a solution?

I thought the tray was cool too! Unfortunately, we could never get it
behave reliably for everyone (and we really did try). I think this was
mostly a combination of variable hardware and the ergonomics of
exerting pressure on the bottom screen-edge. We also had ongoing
issues with the position of the notifications at the bottom of the
screen: people didn't notice them.

> 3) realistically what are the chances of us working with the other interested parties and creating a 
> functional/unified spec once and for all. We could do the whole Mantle-->Vulkan transition with 
> appindicator-->XDG-appicon or something of the sort. My dream is to create a solution for everyone, not 
> just GNOME

The challenge with doing anything new is adoption. One of the main
issues we face with status icons today is the long tail - all those
old apps that don't follow upstream all that closely (if at all).
Getting all of those on a new protocol is unlikely to happen.

A more general comment: back when we last made changes to status
icons, we had a two-part strategy:

 1. Push libcloudproviders as the way for apps like Dropbox to integrate
 2. Make sure there was a well-publicised, well-functioning extension
for when people do need status icons

Unfortunately it seems like 1 hasn't really happened, and poking
around this morning I couldn't find a single functioning extension for
status icons. So there's that. :(

Allan