Re: DockBar-style minimization

[Tomasz Sterna <tomek xiaoka com>]

Dnia 2010-04-13, wto o godzinie 09:52 -0500, Ryan Peters pisze:
> I simply mean to suggest an alternate, somewhat more organized way to 
> handle minimization. I like that "docking" concept you mentioned, but 
> why would it have to be separate from minimization? Is there a need
> to 
> develop an add-on/extension/plugin/patch for it? The issue that my 
> design fixes is Problem 3, which could be more easily worded like
> this: 
> "What if I want an application running in the background while being 
> easily controllable without disrupting my work-flow (un-minimizing
> it)?". 

I don't like the windows taskbar concept.
I never liked it, from the very beginning Windows 95 introduced it and
hate that every other OS copied it verbatim (KDE, GNOME, etc.) or some
varianto of it (MacOS Dock).

I loved the decision Gnome Shell to finally get rid of it.
Activities overview is soooo much nicer and intuitive.


But I see your point. There is a use case in presenting actions menu for
background applications. They don't even need to be minimised.
I think this functionality should be added to the Activities application
icon on the sidebar. Gnome Shell could provide an API which applications
could use to add items to the application icon on the Activities
sidebar.

We could use application .desktop file for this, similarly how new
Ubuntu Indicator Applet uses it.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MessagingMenu#API