thoughts on the systray

[Fred Schaettgen]

Olivier Goffart <ogoffart <at> kde.org> writes:   
..   
> >  I know this. That's why I said this special part of the taskbar could be   
> > actually a separate applet, i.e. there'd be the "normal" taskbar and then   
> > there'd be the "systray" taskbar. There'd still be the other advantages of   
> > doing it the taskbar way instead of the current systray way.   
>    
> Can you explain the difference with that applet and the current taskbar ?   
> I agree that it is a great feature to allow every application to be placed in 
> the "systray" .  but why can't we use the current systray for that ?   
   
You could, but the systray is less accessible than the taskbar and the taskbar  
has full control over everything. So it could zoom and fade icons, colorize  
them etc.    
I really like Lubos' idea of having several task bars with different looks plus 
custom menus for the tray items. If we had three trays - a regular one, one 
that shows only icons and one that can be folded to a single blue triangle -   
then it would look the same as today, but with a more accessible and consistent 
interface for the tray icons, no demand for adding a tray icon yet another 
application, more felxibility for the user and more possiblities to change the  
appearance of what looks like the tray then.   
   
The drawback is that it's slightly less flexible than the current tray icons,   
so a few tray icons whould have to become applets. For me this would look like  
that:   
   
Mixer -> Applet   
Keyboard layout -> Applet   
Klipper -> Taskbar   
Wallet -> Taskbar   
Bluetooth -> Taskbar   
Kopete -> Taskbar   
KMail -> Taskbar   
korgac -> Taskbar   
amarok -> Taskbar   
   
So most tray icons could in fact go to the taskbar - or one of them to be   
exact.   
   
If these different taskbars are all independant, there has to be a single 
instance which decides which window is displayed in which tray at first. Then   
it should be possible to drag windows from one tray to another one.   
   
So if a window annoys you, then you just take it and "move it to the right".  
Or move it to the windows-dumping-group which pops up when you hoover over the  
blue triangle which once belonged to KDE 3.4's system tray.    
The problem here is how to advertise the drag-and-drop functionality, because 
its absolutly not obvious (but it would be also nice to move applications to  
other desktops). But that's a general problem with drag and drop. Maybe it can  
be solved one day by highlighting each potential drop target if an item is  
drageed. So there should also be a RMB-submenu like the "To desktop"-menu to  
move a window to other taskbar.   
  
The resulting concept for users will be that every item in every taskbar  
corresponds to a window (maybe a notification message, maybe an application's  
main window), which is raised when they click it.   
And there is not difference between daemonlike programs and others. We don't  
know where to draw the line for this ourselves, so I don't see why there should 
be different places for programs that are some sort of daemon and those which  
are not. The difference has to be made by the user: Applications they want to  
work with and applications that should stay out of the way.  
   
..   
> >  There's no reason kicker applets couldn't do what systray icons can.   
> > That's what I meant with KPixmapPanelApplet.   
>    
> Ok.   
> But anyway, applet take currently the full height of my horizontal kicker.    
> while systray icons are by columns of two   
   
This can always be changed. And actually it would be good to have this changed  
no matter if we keep the system tray or not.   
   
Fred