KNotificationItem class name is confusing

Sebastian Trüg trueg at kde.org
Wed Oct 28 09:17:12 GMT 2009


I agree that the name is not great. Remind me why we are not using somethign 
like "KSystrayItem"? Sure, systray is a weird word but everyone knows what it 
is...

Cheers,
Sebastian

On Wednesday 28 October 2009 09:57:08 Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> 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/
> 




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