Running applications in the background

[Evandro Giovanini <efgiovanini gmail com>]

Hi,

There are applications users want to have running all the time, such
as a music player, e-mail, chat, download manager, among others, but
they don't want them cluttering their window list/overview while they
do work with other applications.

With GNOME 2 developers inconsistently used the notification area to
"hide" their applications, resulting in a poor user experience.

Are there any plans to properly tackle this with GNOME 3?

My preferred way to handle it would be to keep the application running
when the user closes their main window. The application's main window
can then be restored using the Dash.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Evandro