thoughts on the systray

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 13 February 2005 06:12, Gábor Lehel wrote:
> In my opinion the problem isn't apps embedding themselves in the tray
> for the sole purpose of being embedded in the tray per se, as it can
> be useful and there's certainly situations where the user might want
> it, but rather that it is left to each app to decide this and not the
> user -- who is then stuck with some apps which are always in the
> systray, and others (s)he can't get out of it.

we have systray icon hiding and a proper systray spec would make that a lot 
more powerful. if we them remove the icons that shouldn't be there from their 
applications i think a lot of these issues will evaporate. our HIG will need 
to cover what's not appropriate in the systray.

> My thought was to have some sort of KWin-titlebar-action for this,
> combining it with a few other things (possibly including but not
> limited to, on all desktops, keep above others, etc.), essentially a
> way for the user to say 'this app is important'. That way the user
> gets total control over which apps are in the systray, and which
> aren't.

i think this belongs more in the taskbar than the systray.

> (Or, rambling now, maybe have a seperate area for these sorts 
> of apps, to seperate them from the 'notification area' -- maybe also

for the record, i'm not happy with the term 'notification area' because it 
doesn't reflect reality. if we remove the context menus from the system tray, 
users will lynch us (well, me. they blame me for everything in kicker these 
days, no matter who does it =P ), and if we leave the context menus there 
it's more than just notification.

moreover, "notification" immediately limits what people can do with the 
systray. i'd rather say what is not acceptable in the tray rather than what 
is and allow our application devs to come up with creative ideas that don't 
fall within the realm of the "do nots". negative space vs. positive space =)

> replace their taskbar entry entirely with an icon in this area...).

and break UI consistency. no, let's not copy MacOS X here please. 

User: "why are only SOME of my windows in the taskbar?" 

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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