Re: Re : interapplication communication

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-12-30 at 09:52 -0600, Apoorva Sharma wrote:
> The mockup of the message tray system here:
> http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/mockups/20090630-demo shows
> something similar to a minimized list of applications. Perhaps
> applications could create an icon there when they open, and shrink
> down to their icon when they are minimized. Furthermore, it could
> allow more complex interaction as shown in the mockup (e.g. music
> control) by showing a Docky like popup on mouseover, which each
> application could customize for themselves. If the application was not
> built for Gnome, the popup could simply show the traditional close,
> minimize, etc.

I don't think putting arbitrary applications there is something we want
to do - once you have things there that don't have anything to do with
messages being displayed, then it will be confusing to the user what the
bottom panel is about.

But certainly our hope is that the message tray can take over many of
the functions that you would currently do by switching to an application
or interacting with an icon in the system tray.

 - Your music player shows you the track it just started playing in 
   a message; you decide to skip it, so you do that with a control
   attached to the message.

 - You want to know what the current song or last song is, so you
   mouse to the lower right hand, and click on the music player
   icon to see past messages.

 - You want to resume a conversation that you were having with a
   friend, so you mouse to the lower right hand corner and
   click on their avatar.

- Owen