Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] [patch] Show window when not visible

["Seth Nickell" <snickell stanfordalumni org>]

Right now I would suggest that rb use the notification area in the way 
that is most directly useful rather than worrying what the guidelines 
will or won't be.

The notification area was indeed conceived of primarily for notification 
but it could be used to solve the problem of providing desktop "always 
available" access to simple control tools that we don't want always 
available in every gnome config (wireless stuff, afs ticket manager, 
volume control, nuclear launch button).

I think people's fear (certainely  mine) is that this will turn into the 
dumping ground that is the windows notification area. This  would be a 
danger of opening the area up to more than notification. But.... I would 
rather try to control this through social pressure to avoid unecessary 
items and guidelines. We *do* want tight integration between apps and 
desktop, esp. for apps like rb that will be running most of the time.

Now, that said, having an icon that hides and shows the rb window is not 
an appropriate use of the notification area whether it gets dedicated to 
notification or opened up to simple controls. This is a job for the 
window list or something like that and the hiding of windows in this 
style is odd and potentially very confusing. Additionally I don't even 
think its the best use of the area.

I would suggest having left clicking on the rb notification icon pop up 
a small 'menu' that includes the current song title, pause/play, next, 
previous, and something to show the main rb interface (but don't ever 
hide it in all workspaces... So no "hide" button, just switch to rb's 
workspace and bring it to top). I'll save justifications for later since 
my cell phone's moving out of range ;-)

-seth

On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 12:14PM -0800, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 13:34, Colin Walters wrote:
>>  On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 04:38, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
>>  > Is an applet the right thing to do for this kind of things? One
>>  > advantage of tray icons is that their life cycle is tied to 
>> rhythmbox,
>>  > ie they only appear when rhythmbox is running. This is harder to 
>> make
>>  > that work properly with an applet.
>>
>>  Well the thing is that we're not supposed to use tray icons the way we
>>  do, according to the guidelines I've seen.
>
> Those guidelines (unfortunately) never got very far and were certainly
> far from set in stone. I'm not sure what to suggest on that count- you
> might want to restart the discussion on the usability list, with your
> specific use-case in mind. Probably it's going to take someone with a
> lot of patience to hammer something through the usability list. [And
> possibly willing to write code to enforce the behaviors decided on by
> the usability list.]
>
> Luis
>
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-Seth
-Seth