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Hello everyone,<br>
<br>
the VDG told me to take a look at the system tray after the 5.0
releases, because even though it's a huge step forward, we felt that
there are some inconsistencies in how it behaves. My task was to
identify these issues and come up with possible solutions. We talked
about them already and think it is now time to come forwards with
our suggestions. If these ideas are accepted we'll deliver
guidelines on how to integrate an application nicely into the system
tray.<br>
<h3>Status Notifiers</h3>
<p>Current status:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Passive ones often don't provide useful services (as intended
by the specification) </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Other DEs hide them [passive notifiers] completely </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Some applications can only be resumed after clicking the
notifier in the popup<br>
</li>
</ul>
One key problem I have found is that status notifiers are somewhat
abused on the desktop. Plasma migrates status notifiers that are in
a "passive" state into the system tray popup. The specification
mentions that this state should only be used when the applications
does nothing of interest. Many applications follow that line of
thought, some don't. <br>
The question is, when the notifiers don't do anything interesting in
their passive state, then why show them at all? I don't think that
the process of terminating an applications warrants the need for
their own notifier. Unity, the only other DE to my knowledge that
uses status notifiers, hides these too. We think that is a sensible
approach. It would de-clutter the system tray popup and provide a
more consistent behaviour in general. <br>
Our dream system tray would handle status notifier like that:<br>
<ul>
<li>"Passive" notifiers would be hidden completely, there's no way
to interact with them</li>
<li> "Active" notifiers reside in the panel area of the system
tray</li>
<li>"NeedsAttention" notifiers change their icon. We'd recommend a
change of color<br>
</li>
</ul>
This would, of course, break some applications like KTorrent. How
would it behave ideally? When you open KTorren and there are no
torrents configured there should not be an indicator as the
applications simply does nothing for now (passive). As soon as one
adds a torrent a notifiers should be shown (active). The user can
then close or minimize the window and do what they do. When a
torrent finishes downloading the status of the indicator should
change to "needsAttention" to notify the user that the download has
finished. If the user then does not remove the torrent from KTorrent
i.e. it continues seeding, the indicator should stay in an "active"
state, not "passive" as it is now.<br>
<br>
Because this would break some applications we think that it would be
a good idea to announce these plans now but only enforce them in say
4 release cycles.<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3>Plasmoids</h3>
Plasmoids in the system tray are those programs that draw these
fancy looking dialogues in the system tray popup.<br>
<ul>
<li>Purpose of icons in popup is not clear – often only lead to an
empty page</li>
<li>Can not be hidden, because some the user decides what's
important or not</li>
<li>Use differently coloured icons in popup, even though those
different colours don't indicate a functional difference.<br>
</li>
</ul>
For now, (almost) all system tray plasmoids don't do anything useful
when their icon resides in the popup, similar to status notifiers.
When one open e.g. the network manager plasmoid and decides to check
what this notification icon is they are greeted with "No new
notifications". When one goes through the list it's always the same
"No battery detected", "No removable media found" etc.<br>
Additionally there is/was a bug that some plasmoid icons would use a
lighter shade of grey in the popup. This was a bit confusing as
there is no functional difference between.<br>
<br>
We propose to act on this bug and and desaturate the icons of
plasmoids in the popup when the plasmoid can not provide anything of
interest to the user e.g. no new notifications. Additionally we
either want to make these plasmoids immune to left clicks or take
the user to the configuration dialogue of the plasmoid upon a left
click. We are not quite sure about that yet.<br>
It was pointed out to us that some users may wish to change the
default setting, so that plasmoids which hold information for the
user do not migrate to the system tray. If the user does this, then
this plasmoid should retain its original color in the popup.
Additionally the plasmoid icons should be sorted from top to bottom,
relevant (saturated) to irrelevant (desaturated). <br>
<br>
<h3>Expander</h3>
<br>
The expander is this little upward pointing arrow to the right of
the system tray. We were not able to find out what the actual name
of it is.<br>
Clicking on it takes the user to an overview page, where the
plasmoids/indicators are listed with their names and icons. <br>
However, if our plans are to be realised then this page is not
needed. Status notifiers will not show up in the popup and the name
of plasmoids is easily discovered by hovering over the icon, or
clicking on the icon. Unless someone here has any ideas what this
could be uses for we would vote for removing this page from the
system tray. <br>
<br>
We are eager to hear what you think :) <br>
<br>
Cheers<br>
Phil<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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