Re: Bug#633795: ITP: evolution-tray -- Plugin for Evolution to put it in notification area
On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 at 11:05:53 +0200, Arno Töll wrote:
> I can't believe Gnome 3
> wouldn't support older legacy tray widgets though, I'd assume it would,
> similar to KDE 4, supports older tray widgets through some legacy wrapping.
GNOME 3 has a freedesktop-compatible notification area ("tray") (although
it's less visible than it used to be - the status icons only appear when a
notification is shown or the mouse pointer hits the bottom of the screen),
so technically, this will work. The deprecation isn't technical, it's social
(following the GNOME 3 UI design). The notification area was meant to be for
notifications, but in practice nearly everyone used it as a dumping ground
for persistent things: background applications, status indications
(battery, wifi, ...), and so on.
The recommended thing in GNOME 3 is to use persistent notifications, which
stay around until the user has read them, and so don't need to be associated
with a status icon.
<http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/MessageTray>
The GNOME 2 HIG also discouraged use of the notification area for
non-notification things, but less strongly, and in practice everyone puts
them there anyway because it's easier and more cross-desktop than writing
a panel applet... (HIG reference:
<http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/2.32/desktop-notification-area.html.en>)
This isn't unique to GNOME 3 - Unity has a similar design (persistent
notifications, and dedicated UI widgets for "core UI" things like
battery/wifi indicators), and Windows suffers particularly badly from
developers misusing the notification area in the same way, although Microsoft's
attempts to solve it have been a bit different
(<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511448.aspx>).
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that KDE 4 has a similar solution, but I
haven't used KDE much since 2.x, so I don't know how they dealt with this.
S
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