thoughts on the systray

[Michael Brade]

On Sunday 13 February 2005 23:58, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> the idea i'd like to see for the system is thus:
>
> 	o a DBUS bus that applications can publish "i have a system tray entry,
> here are the details of it". the application would update this information
> as state changed. think about autohiding icons, for instance, and the need
> to know the current state of an application (idle, important stuff
> happening, etc).
>
> 	o host apps (e.g. the systray applet in kicker) would consume this data to
> present an interface. the interface would be 100% under the control of the
> host app, including what to do when the user, for instance, right clicks on
> an entry versus left clicks on an entry.
>
> the application with a systray entry would only publish data, (and receive
> event notifications, for instance "the user wants to see a context menu for
> this entry") and not have anything to do with the actual presentation or
> management of the GUI.
Erm... there is no management of the GUI in the systray anyway. You have 
exactly the mouse clicks, nothing else. So the event notifications would have 
to be "LMB clicked", "MMB clicked", "RMB clicked" and all three with double 
clicks as well. (Additionally you might have to submit the mouse position.)

> this immediately puts some limits on the system 
> tray, allows the host app to sanely and powerfully manage the information
> in its display 
If you break my little app (KNotes) I'll know where to find you! That includes 
if you force it to have a big ugly main window or make it impossible to 
create the menus that have to be shown on ?MB click.

> and separates the publish/display actions. 
What's the difference between these? What is a "publish action"?

-- 
Michael Brade;                 KDE Developer, Student of Computer Science
  |-mail: echo brade !#|tr -d "c oh"|s\e\d 's/e/\@/2;s/$/.org/;s/bra/k/2'
  °--web: http://www.kde.org/people/michaelb.html

KDE 3: The Next Generation in Desktop Experience
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