[Panel-devel] Systray (was Re: Drag'n'drop everything)

[Niels Voll]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

>hey Niels, good to see you here =)
>
>  
>
thanks for the warm welcome :)      I hope it's ok to de-lurk.

>On Wednesday 17 August 2005 08:25, Niels Voll wrote:
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>>On one of my desktops I currently have 21 little icons squished into the
>>systray. That's getting rather ugly and slows me down when hunting for
>>the volume control :)
>>    
>>
>...
>
>letting a user scatter these icons 
>everywhere (4 here, 5 there, etc) won't actually address the problem of 
>having 20 icons.
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>  
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agreed, if you think of the icons as being fundamentally all of the same 
nature. However, might one argue, that there are potentially 4 quite 
different types of these icons? If that is the case, it might not be 
random "scattering" but an innovative way to organize an increasingly 
cluttered neighborhood on the screen. The 4 types I'm thinking of are:

A) continuous monitoring / metering / status
   - of hardware (CPU, network, io, ...)
   - of software services/deamons/background processes (antivirus, 
firewall, ...)
   - real world (time, weather, public service alert levels, ...)

B) discrete event notification / alarms
   - hardware events (plugging and unplugging of devices, running low on 
disk space, overheating the motherboard,  ...)
   - software events ("you have mail", calendar notifications, software 
updates, ...)
   - real world events (stock market, weather alerts, ...)

C) tiny pop-up GUI controls (volume, screen resolution, keyboard 
mapping, ...)

D) often used or favorite links/shortcuts/aliases ("often used" would be 
an attempt at measurable criteria while "favorite" is subjective)
   - computer hardware infrastructure control
   - infrastructure software control (typically services / deamons / 
background processes)
   - any software application (or several?)
   - any document (or several?)
   - any folder (or several?)
   - any window (or several?)
   - a state of the computer ( is that a session? or a desktop?)


Items in A would be the always visible items. Items in B would not have 
to visible at all until the event or alarm condition is met.

The items in C seem to me to be a quite different thing than A or B. 
Aren't they mostly defined in that they are mini applications, which are 
very quick to use?  They are really quick to invoke, start 
instantaneously, are simple and therefore quick to learn and use, and 
they disappear instantaneously after one is done with them.

And the items in D seem to be a rather arbitrary collection of launchers.

So isn't there a potentially quite natural grouping, which might aid in 
organizing the space they  occupy?



Or maybe I'm the only one who sees 4 rather different kinds of 
"inhabitants" of the systray ...