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

[Britt Yazel <bwyazel gnome org>]

Is there not away to improve the spec while also maintaining backwards compatibility with the current statusnotifier (I'm not sure if that's the right name) spec? Kstatusnotifier works well on the surface, it sounds like behind the scenes there may be issues, but even if we just used the current tech that runs kstatusnotifier it would be an improvement for many of our users. It seems like the folks at Ubuntu already did a good job of turning many apps onto that spec

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 2:28 AM Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:

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