Thoughts on the systray II.

[Lubos Lunak]

On Friday 15 of April 2005 18:46, Lubos Lunak wrote:
[...]
>  Anyway, if people will like this, the plan would be something like
> - finishing the patches, so that there really is a separate titlebar
> button, that there would be the RMB menu, and who knows what

 Attached is the latest version of the patches. There's now a really separate 
button for docking in the tray, there's support for a RMB menu and a tooltip. 
There's a separate class KDockHandler, kind of like KSystemTray replacement, 
which can provide the tray all this information. I think the patches are 
technically more or less done, so I'd like to start committing them after the 
issues listed below are solved.

> - deciding on the exact GUI behaviour (which can be enforced to be
> consistent between the apps), e.g. I think the titlebar button should
> perhaps just put the icon into the tray for LMB and additionally also
> "minimize" the window for RMB. Currently one has to toggle the KeepBelow
> button and then minimize. This also includes deciding whether the icons
> should be in a separate systray applet, or should be perhaps in a separate
> part of the taskbar, or so. - proving a KSystemTray-like class that'd
> provide the RMB menu, and perhaps icon, tooltip or whatever.

 These issues are all rather non-technical, and so I'm rather bad at deciding 
them :-/ . The remaining problem as, in no particular order:

- Behaviour of left/middle/right clicking: The old systray LMB behaviour is 
different from the taskbar. Since the patches kind of turn the systray into 
another taskbar and the items can be moved between them, this would be 
inconsistent. On the other hand I can see lots of people complaining if it 
uses the taskbar configuration. Any better idea than having another 
configuration for the buttons like taskbar does?

- Since the icon is not handled by the application but by the applet, the 
application doesn't have any direct control over it. Which means it doesn't 
get any events from it, so things like DND or scrollwheeling don't work. Also 
some systray apps have special actions on e.g. MMB. There shouldn't be a big 
problem with forwarding the events, even with DND it should work, but the 
questions are a) does anybody consider this reduced control a problem, and b) 
how much should be forwarded?

- Currently the icon knows the standard properties of the window, like title, 
app type, icon and so on, and additionally there's the tooltip. What more 
info should there be? There probably should be a special tray-only icon ... 
something more?

- I tried to check all systray apps in CVS that are of this type 1) (i.e. not 
applet-like systray apps) and it seems that they all should work fine with 
this new system (AFAICS), with the exception of KMix, which has a rather 
non-standard behaviour when it comes to clicking on the icon and window 
showing/hiding (I think there even were bugreports about this and problems 
about how this should exactly work). I think KMix should work just like the 
gnome mixer icon, which is an applet showing the slider, and launches the 
fullblown mixer application.


 Hmm, that's probably all. If people don't say anything, I'll just do as I'll 
see fit and will commit (that's a threat :) ).

> - (the "I'm bored case") making it work somewhat reasonably even for 3.5
> without having two systray icons and so on

 Probably not really doable. So the question is rather if the potential mess 
would be worth the new features.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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