Thoughts on the systray II.

[Lubos Lunak]

On Monday 25 of April 2005 23:48, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> On Monday 25 April 2005 22:36, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> > Le Lundi 25 Avril 2005 20:46, Michael Pyne a écrit :
> > > On Monday 25 April 2005 10:45 am, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > > > - Since the icon is not handled by the application but by the
> > > > applet, the application doesn't have any direct control over it.
> > >
> > > How would this work with e.g. juk's systray icon?  juk shows its
> > > state in the systray, so it needs to be able to switch the icon for
> > > starters.
> >
> > This is not really a problem, as you can simply modify the main
> > window icon to reflect the state (and so the state is shown even in
> > the task bar)
> >
> > This is quite unusual to to this, but i don't see a reason against.
>
> I wonder how that should work for Kontact where the mail part and the
> RSS reader part can both show a status icon.

 I use neither Kontact  nor the systray icon for KMail ... let me see. Hmm, 
rather strange, one window has two systray icons that more or less act like 
one.

 The idea behind the patches is that one window can be turned into one tray 
icon by setting a certain flag on it. A bit like the taskbar. So as long as 
there's one window, there's at most one icon. Standalone KMail's tray icon 
would fall into category 1), i.e. tray icon being a small representation for 
the main window, showing status; the same aKregator. But with the rather 
unusual concept of Kontact swallowing several apps there seems to be a 
problem.

 Hmms ... I can see several possible solutions for this, but I'd first like to 
know what you'd suggest.


 Possible solutions I can think of, in no particular order:
- applets - IMHO applets are better for representing permanent state 
indication. Years ago I used to use only KBiff and launched KMail using it. 
So there would be a mail notification applet and an RSS indication applet 
that'd launch KMail. But I expect this would lead to some technical problems, 
and there would be also KMail's tray icon if somebody docks it as well in 
order to remove it from the taskbar.

- having only one tray icon - That'd mean the KMail and aKregator parts would 
have to share the icon (and merge the tooltip text, etc.). I have no idea how 
separate the parts in Kontact are and how complicated this would be. Also 
currently the tray shows a quite small icon, so I don't know if trying to fit 
more info there would be suitable (not that I can read that '11464' in it 
very well now, but I presume people who actually use it do something in order 
not to have 11000+ unread messages in trash directly filtered on the server). 
Making the tray icon optionally wider would solve this, just like it would 
with media players that want to show more buttons (I think I've seen some 
media player to have several tray icons for several buttons), but that'd 
complicate the layouting for tall Kicker, and I'd expect to see Aaron moaning 
about that.

- two windows, meaning two tray icons - Having two real windows would easily 
allow two tray icons, but that'd indeed cause a small problem with Kontact. 
It should be possible to have kind of "toplevel" windows that'd be always 
docked in the tray, but I don't like the idea that much, that'd mean having 
more or less what we have now, just with a different mechanism. If I don't 
succeed with 2) this will be probably the only way to have applet-like 
systray icons, but I don't want to try it this way yet. There'd be also the 
additional problem that one of the systray icons would be the real one for 
the main window, and the other would have to be glued in somehow.

 It seem I cannot think of any other way right now, but I'll try to later. So 
far I think just having one merged tray icon would be ok. What do you think?

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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