Re: My opinions on Gnome Shell

[Julien Olivier <julo42 gmail com>]

>         There are more reasons to want particular application to be
>         running for some time without interfering with others, I gave
>         just one.
> 
> This could be a good time to tell us what those other reasons are.

Hi,

this has been said several times already but I'll say it again: there
are applications that need to run constantly but with which the user
only needs to interact from time to time. This is the case mainly for
music players, email applications, instant messengers and download
managers / torrent clients.

Currently, applications in this category can (optionally or not) (ab)use
the notification area (banshee, rhythmbox, empathy, transmission), or
try to split their app into a daemon and a UI (empathy developers are
thinking about it). And some applications just don't bother find a
solution (evolution).

I don't see why, for such applications, having a way to minimize them
(hide the main window from the screen, the overlay and the ALT-TAB list,
but keep the application running in background) would hurt.

If the problem with it is that developers fear that users won't know
where there application window has gone when they minimize it, I think
it's nothing to be worried about as the window will still be accessible
by clicking on the application launcher.

If the problem is that developers don't want to have a "minimize" button
on the title bar (for any reason), a possible solution could be to have
a parameter in the desktop file specification to declare that the
application needs to run in the background. And if it is the case, the
"close" button will minimize the app instead of closing it.

We really need to find a generic solution to that problem, that will
work without having to wait for application designers to find the
solution by themselves, because they will never agree to do the same
thing, and this will lead to inconsistency and/or abuse of other
technologies.

(Sorry for the long rant.)