KNotificationItem class name is confusing

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Hi,

At the risk of starting yet another lengthy discussion, I would like to
bring this to the list. As you probably know, kdelibs 4.4 will ship with
KNotificationItem, a class wrapping the brand new dbus-based
implementation of the systemtray protocol, saving us from the wrath of
X-Embed.
This new protocol is really an improvement over the existing one, but I
believe the class name is wrong as people think KNotificationItem is
about notifications. This is worsened by the fact that kdelibs also
features a KNotification class, which manages notifications. Many times
I had to explain people this new protocol and classes are not about
notifications.

Some discussion about this on the xdg@ list didn't get much following,
but what came out though is that the name was difficult to choose and
developers settled on KNotificationItem in the end because both Windows
and GNOME refer to the systray as the "Notification Area".

This got me thinking about potential, less confusing, names. So I would
like to present some ideas I got (hopefully a bit less lame than the one
I posted on xdg@):

- KNotificationAreaItem: This is consistent with the fact that these are
items from the "Notification Area". Still it contains the word
Notification, which I do not believe should be there.

- StatusAreaItem: I thought about this one when I read a post about the
work done by Fedora people on systray icons [1]. In this post they call
the icons "status icons".

What do you think? Is it too late? Am I just a painful nit-picker? Do
you have better ideas?

Aurélien

[1] http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/mclasen/2009/10/26/5-little-things/