[Panel-devel] Drag'n'drop everything

[Vince Negri]

Pierre D. wrote:

>>>Another idea with drag and drop : I suppose we will still have a systray
>>>in KDE4, won't we ?
>>>If yes, then it'd be great to be able to drag and drop any window to the
>>>systray...
>>
>>What would be the effect of dragging a Konqueror window that shows a
>>folder into the systray?
> 
> You'd have that window in your systray, without having it in your taskbar...

That's what I was afraid of ;-)

Personally, (and I admit this is my personal taste) I don't like it when 
the systray changes from being a status/notification area into a sort of 
"second taskbar" or even worse "second launcher."  The horrors that 
existed on many OEM Windows 2000 PCs, where at least 5cm
of space next to the clock was occupied with *static* icons!

Anything that goes into the systray should imho be something with a 
dynamic icon that gives you information, not just a minimised app/document.

In your xchat example, could KDE monitor the xchat window and make the 
icon flash when it updated? Then you would have the systray "feel" - but 
you can see how this gets hard for generic app/document windows.

It seems to me that one reason people like to put minimised windows in 
the systray (where they exist as static icons) is to (a) free up taskbar 
space and (b) have the icon for that window in a consistent place. Both 
issues came up last night on #plasma - how do we make the "taskbar" more 
usable?

I think that if the issues (a) and (b) can be sorted for the taskbar, 
the systray can be left to do what it's good at - act as a notification 
area.

In that context, your idea can be approached rather like the "everything 
can be dragged to trash" one - it gives us a question to ask ourselves. 
In contemplating an onscreen entity, we can ask "what would it mean to 
drag this to the systray? Is there something we can do in response to 
that that is consistent with what the systray is, makes sense as a 
response to the action, and will not surprise the user?"

For example:
if you have a desktop applet that shows weather information and drag it 
to the notification area, then that makes sense because such applets 
convey updating information - so in that case you remove the applet from 
the desktop, put it in the notification area as an icon (hopefully, the 
applet with make the icon match the weather) and flash the icon when the 
applet updates.

but dragging a application launcher to the notification area is a 
different matter. The notification area is not a launcher, and so there 
is no meaningful action (or is there? suggestions? :-))

My 2 pence :)