thoughts on the systray

[Gary L. Greene Jr.]

On Monday 14 February 2005 1:23 pm, Jason Keirstead wrote:
> On Monday 14 February 2005 1:33 pm, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > it's a complete abuse of the concept of a system tray
>
> That totally depends on what yor interpertation is of the purpose of the
> systray. Like I said above(and below).. I don't think it was ever intended
> for notifications. It is highly un-optimized for this task.
>
> > 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.
>
> There is a big difference between taking up less space vs. taking up no
> space.
>
> For apps that are running 24/7, people don't want them in the taskbar *at
> all*, because the utility of having them there is zero - in these cases,
> the process is no longer a task - it is never going to be closed - it is
> more like a daemon.
>
> > positioning is changeable. we're talking about the actual concept at use
> > here.
>
> Not really.. you are arguing that new users don't understand the concept of
> docking.. how many would know how to move the system tray? Heck, even if
> you do know how, it is a non-trivial job.. you need to create a kicker
> entention, position it on the screen, put it there... it is not like you
> can just move it.
>
> > 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.
>
> No, of course not, but...
>
> > it makes lots of sense to  have it in the systray where you can glance
> > down at it.
>
> No it doesn't. If I have to glance at it to even know it happened, it is
> not a notification. For it to be a notification it has to at least cacth
> the eye - once it has caught the eye, you can choose to look at it to read
> it, or ignore it until you are done your task.
>
> As it stands right now, the tray is in such a position that it doesn't
> catch the eye. Thus the only way to use it for notifications is to show a
> big passive popup window, or play a sound and animaiton or both.
>
> If notifications took place in the upper left / right of the screen, as I
> suggested, there woudl be a much higher liklihood that you would notice the
> change, even with no sound or baloon.

This is one of the areas I very much disagree with you. With your statement 
listed above, you'd proport that the Mac OS Finder is a much easier UI to 
notice "events". This is totally not true for many of the users I deal with 
daily, largely due to the paradigms that they are used to from a PC 
environment. We all have to realise that close to 90% of the users out there 
are using MS Windows. Because of this, they tend to pay MORE attention to the 
bottom center and right on the taskbar region than the left, due to current 
desktop paradigm. This is why I generally don't call the tray a System 
Notification tray, but an Event and Tool Tray, since it does more than just 
publishing events.

-- 
Gary L. Greene, Jr.
Sent from uriel
 13:29:30 up 21:40,  4 users,  load average: 0.36, 0.33, 0.28
 
============================================================
Developer and Project Lead for the Ark Linux Project
 check out http://www.arklinux.org/ for more info.
 Also http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~greeneg/
EMAIL : greeneg at arklinux.com
============================================================
 
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