Re: panel notification area -- not many apps

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Calum Benson <calum benson sun com> writes:

[...]

> Funnily enough, I was thinking about this the other day, but I couldn't
> really think of a clear guideline.  You'd really want a "new mail"
> notification icon to disappear as soon as you've cleared your new mail,
> for example, there's no point in it hanging around.  But then you have
> the problem of how to get it at its context menu when it's disappeared,
> so we also need good guidelines about what sort of things should go on a
> status icon's context menu. :)

What, of course you just send yourself mail. Isn't that obvious? :-)

> The clearest distinction I could come up with is icons that tell you
> about binary events (you do/don't have new mail, you are/aren't still
> logged into your chat client), and icons that tell you about a range of
> events (your network connection is currently
> idle/sending/receiving/both).  Seems to me the icon should disappear in
> the former case and remain there all the time in the latter case, if we
> are to allow the latter type in the notification area at all... opinion
> seems to be split on that.

I think it's really a question of whether the icon would come and go.
For an IM client, e.g., the icon should go whenever you quit the
client. Unless you would want the client to sit in the panel. But that
seems rather strange to me. For a hardware oriented client where the
hardware is fixed an applet makes more sense to me.

But it's nice to see UI people thinking about this. I'm going to write
a system tray thingie for an IM client soon and it would be really
helpful having some guidelines. Following the HIG made my other
applications 2x more beautiful and clean. :-)

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/