Re: panel notification area -- not many apps (and suggestions for the panel)

[Ben Davis <ben xsusio com>]

Alan wrote:

> What should be avoided of course is the syndrom of windows, where every
> program has it's own tray icon, and eventually your tray gets to be half
> the width of the screen :)
>  

I can definitely agree with that.  I guess the true difference between 
notification icons and panel applets is that the notifaction area 
provides a common space for an application to communicate with the 
user.  I personally think this is a good idea, but they need to be 
careful not to make it too wieldy, and it's also up to developers to use 
good judgement when to use the notification area, and to give users the 
option to disable it if it is present (as gaim does). The problem with 
Windows was that not every icon offered a "do not show in system tray" 
option.  The user should have ultimate control over what he sees in the 
panel.

I guess maybe my issue isn't with the notification area, but with the 
overall management of applets on the panel. Like I said earlier, It's a 
pain in the butt to have to constantly be moving my launchers and 
applets around just b/c one thing has changed.. .  Does anyone agree 
that keeping your applets where you want them is a frusterating task? I 
mean it seems like every day for some reason my applets/launchers get 
moved where I don't want them.   Here's what I would like to have done 
to the panel:  Give the user the option to devide the panel into 
segments, and give those segments certain properties that tell them how 
much of the panel they can use, similar to laying out elements in an 
html table.

For instance, in my situation I would have a left section where I put my 
menu and some launchers,  a middle section where I put my window-list, 
and a right section where I put my other applets...  I would like to be 
able to set up the panel so that my middle section would take up any 
empty space, and the left and right sections would shrink to the 
smallest possible size (with a user-defined padding, maybe) making it so 
that there is NO wasted space on the taskbar.. Again, the best thing 
about this would be that I could customize it any way I want, or maybe 
not use it at all.  I think gnome needs to think about giving its users 
more customizability options... but that's another story...

-Ben Davis