[Usability]Re: Notification Area guidelines

[Lars Weber <lars brokenbits de>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> On X11, my impression is that we're using the notification icons
> because applets can't come and go sanely (they push around your other
> applets, etc., and perhaps can't be in the same process as a main
> application without "issues"). So notification icons almost become
> "applets that are self-managing instead of manually added and
> positioned."

        Without generally arguing for or against a separate notification
area I think that the difference between "is added to the panel manually"
and "comes and goes on it's own" is actually quite large from a user's
perspective.  Therefore, even if notification icons were turned into
applets that pop up on their own, I believe that UI-wise there would still
need to be some kind of "here is the place where notification applets(tm)
go"-like differentiation between the two.

> I'm not sure that's right at all, seems like a workaround for a
> suboptimal applet system, or something.

        That might very well be.  The difficult part, however, is to come
up with an alternative system that works :-)

Regards,
Lars