Re: 3rd party application integration guidelines - how to be a good shell citizen?

[Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>]

Hi!

> Switching to another application is not exactly what I had in
> mind to get rid of the application. I still have the old application
> window around, I see it partially occluded behind non-maximized
> windows, I have it cluttering the Alt+Tab application switcher,
> the application overview and so on. It appears as visual clutter, and
> somewhat contradicts the otherwise distration-free design of the shell.
> 
> I think it would make sense to have a special design for applications
> that users want to keep launched as long as they are logged in
> (because they perform some important background task or keep
> communication channels open), but only interact with once in a while.

Two different things here:
* Interact once in a while: This is a classic example of just moving it
to a second workspace if the window really gets in your way. Power-users
will most likely do this while non-power-users probably just don't have
that many windows that they really see a problem having the mail client
around.

* Important background task: As it is a "background" task you don't want
to have a window available at all times. Just don't tie the application
lifetime to the lifetime of the primary window. If you need
user-interaction (or want to make clear that the application is still
running) use the notification spec in some way. I think the new extra
emblems in the dash might also help here.

I know that these concepts are different from anything we did before.
But "hiding" windows often means that the user really doesn't find the
window anymore ("Where did this window go?").

I agree though that the empathy window is currently out-of-place in the
GNOME shell design but it will likely just be merged into the overview
in 3.2. But that's mostly because the chat stuff is integrated into the
shell anyway now.

As I said before, probably discuss the overall design in #gnome-shell,
they might have some other ideas. Try to see things not with "I want it
to look this way" but "I want a nice user-experience" eye.

Sorry for not having a perfect drop-in solution for all this, yet.

Regards,
Johannes