Re: Gnome shell suggestions after a bit of usage

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Florian Max <florian muellner gmail com> wrote:
> That is severely broken in my opinion, as it turns the "close" button into a
> "close-or-hide-or-whatever-depending-on-the-app" button. Yay consistency!
>
> Florian

Just like the Minimize and Maximize buttons, the close button refers
to a window, not an application (which can have many windows). Closing
a window might result in an application deciding to exit, but ideally
that is invisible to the user (and it just about always is already).
The only thing that matters — and the only thing we have ever actively
expressed to end users — is that the window goes away.

For ordering an application to Quit you usually have an option in the
application itself, and there's the Application menu in the top bar.
In the case of music players, Ubuntu for example has been patching
music players to remove the explicit Quit option, making it so they
will quit if they aren't doing anything (music is not playing). I'm
not sure where that is upstream.

Unfortunately, we seem to do poorly defining this, and I think that
has resulted in some rather problematic hiccups. (MacOS and newer
mobile platforms have done it well, by contrast). The music player
status icon is a big one: it's there when the rhythmbox process is
running, even though the rest of GNOME only cares that the application
has a visible window. Ubuntu, again, has an interesting idea going on
with its Sound menu, building some consistency around that experience
where music controls are always in the same place. Android does
something interesting, too: it shows the status icon when it's doing
something (playing music), and otherwise the music player is available
where it always is: the launcher.

--
Dylan