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

[Koppányi Tamás <kornenator gmail com>]

 

Yes, but the question remains: How is a headless application
represented in GNOME Shell? How does the user send an application to
the background, given that the minimize button is gone? Is it
really a good idea to go for the inconsistency and just not exit these
applications on window close, but send them to the background instead?

as a plain user, i'd really love to see some consistency there. the use of the close button became sort of a chaos, and now i have to remember individually for each application whether the X in the top-right corner will actually close it, or just hide it somewhere (i.e. Banshee used to close properly, but since it has systemtray/indicator support, it just gets hidden). now i am using keyboard shortcuts to manage this, but even there i found some inconsistency: some apps close with ctrl+w, some with ctrl+q, so the user has to remember individually again for each app how to actually shut it down.

imho, it would be great to have a second button on the titlebar for hiding windows. and i don't necessarily mean minimizing here, but it would be great to know that the X does close the app, and the other button for example can put it on a new workspace, or something. just to get it out of sight (so you don't need to go nto activities mode and drag&drop it on another workspace). there could be some showing the user that the app has been moved to another workspace (like the workspaces sidebar showing up, and the app going there with some "minimize" effect).