Re: notifications in gtk

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Nov 6, 2012, at 8:01 AM, Kristian Rietveld <kris loopnest org> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 6, 2012, at 4:23 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> Problems with GtkStatusIcon
>> 
>> - It is really centered around the idea that apps just export a small
>> bit of their UI into the 'panel'
>> 
>> - It assumes that all desktops want to offer a permanent place
>> ("system tray") for applications to present a clickable icon with a
>> context menu
>> 
>> - It requires the application to be running as long as its icon is
>> present, essentially forcing a daemon mode onto applications (eg
>> evolution-alarm-notify)
>> 
>> - The X implementation uses XEmbed and can't really be made to work
>> nicely in a composited environment
>> 
>> - The win32 implementation is also problematic
> 
> I would argue the OS X implementation is also problematic. Showing the icon in the OS X menu bar is quite easy, however, in response we currently typically pop up a GtkMenu. This gives interesting problems with grabs/event handling. Also, it looks quite out of place because native applications show a native menu. The current GtkStatusIcon makes it close to impossible to automatically convert a GtkMenu into a native menu (e.g. custom menu items) and there's also the case where the status icon pops up something that's not a menu.

All very true. This *helps* Matthias's case to get rid of GtkStatusIcon.

Another point in favor of Matthias's proposal is dbus-independence. Dbus is great on Linux, but is a poor fit for OSX, and Win32. Dunno about Android, but iOS is decidedly daemon-hostile, so dbus isn't likely to happen there.

As an aside, has anyone ever gotten a Gtk-based program into the iTunes Store -- or the App Store, for that matter?

Anyway, all-in-all this looks very good to me.

Regards,
John Ralls