Re: My opinions on Gnome Shell

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Mon, 2011-06-20 at 13:34 +0200, Julien Olivier wrote:
> >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.
> 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.

I wouldn't "hurt", but it isn't a solution.  There is ongoing
conversation about the right solution to this [as has been mentioned
here several times].  Just bringing back "minimize" isn't a solution.
And you can still just leave them in a workspace.  I always have
Evolution, Empathy, XIRC, and some other misc crap purring away in the
first workspace.  It isn't distracting to actual work/tasks in other
workspaces and if I need to do e-mail etc... I just fly up to the top
workspace.  Works great;  I really sincerely do *not* see a problem.

> 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.

In the workspace expose minimized windows still appear.

> 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.

Applications would still need to cooperate with that setting to get
sane / consistent behavior.  So you are right back to the current
situation.

> 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.

Some rag-tag apps won't cooperate with whatever is decided on, that is
for sure.  But Evolution, Empathy, Banshee, etc... all will;  I have no
doubt.