thoughts on the systray

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 14 February 2005 08:10, Jason Keirstead wrote:
> On Sunday 13 February 2005 8:30 pm, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > no, i don't want to eliminate "minimize/restore on click", but i would
> > like to eliminate systray icons that are ONLY (or at least primarily)
> > used for that and nothing more. kmail/kontact uses the icon for status as
> > well and therefore belongs in the systray =)
>
> I definitly don't think this shuld be eliminated... this is pretty much the
> only thing I use the system tray for at all, and I am pretty sure lots of
> others are in the same boat.

it's a complete abuse of the concept of a system tray and is what we have a 
taskbar for. if the issue is "it takes up too much space to have a taskbar 
entry" then that can be handled by the taskbar. it's not necessary to make 
the system tray broken for everyone else. in other words, we can make 
everyone happy here.

> The system tray is a pretty crappy place for notifications.. it is very
> small, and in the farthest possible corner from thwere your eyes tend to be
> while using the computer(top left to middle center for LTR people, top
> right to middle center for RTL people).

positioning is changeable. we're talking about the actual concept at use here.

> Unless the notifications are large, 
> blinking-type boxes ( or have sounds), you hardly notice them at all. I
> sure don't notice my KMail message count increase unless I look directly at

that's kind of the point. a place for non-urgent, on-demand status updates. we 
don't want kmail to blast a huge notification in the middle of your screen by 
default whenever you have unread mail. it makes lots of sense to have it in 
the systray where you can glance down at it. in kde4 we hopefully will make 
that systray icon even more useful by tieing it to a mini version of the 
kontact summary page.

> However, it is ideal for getting things "out of the way' so to speak. In
> fact I am pretty sure that is why the thing was created at all... to be
> able run apps that you want access to once in awhile, but don't like to be
> in the way. It was not until very recently (in the history of the "tray"
> concept) that it started being used for notifiations.

i'm not sure you've got your facts straight, but let's say you do. what you're 
saying is that because historically we got it wrong, we should keep it 
broken? heh ... uuuuuh.

what this email of yours does show, however, is that the system tray is poorly 
defined in our documentation (documen-what?). we'll have to fix that as well.

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