KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/applets/systemtray

[Michael Rudolph]

On Wednesday 02 July 2008 23:44:47 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 July 2008, Michael Rudolph wrote:
> > On Wednesday 02 July 2008 20:18:08 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > The reason for my pointy-headed enquiry was, that given the time
> > frame (4.3), I was hoping we could already be pushing something
> > fundamentally better than a systemtray.
>
> remember that by using IPC we finally break the link between
> presentation and content here.
>
> which means we could put the systray functionality for icons
> associated with a window *in the taskbar*! something both seli and i
> want *badly*.
>
> that's just one of the possibilities here.
>
> > When I look at what a systray does or rather what it is supposed to
> > do and than look at the possibilities we have with plasma, I wonder
> > how useful it is to pursue this old technology.
>
> it depends on the topic. for some things it's a really easy solution.
> kmix is the classic example imho: it just needs an icon with a popup,
> really. but it also needs/wants to coordinate with its main
> application window.
>
> one could go and write a complex plasmoid for it (that tracks the
> window id of kmix if running, for example) or one could just make a
> systray window the kmix app.
>
> it's a lot less code, a lot simpler to do and in this case is pretty
> much what one wants (well, except for the slider looking like ass; we
> need to fix that as soon as libplasma is out of kdebase)
>
> for many other scenarios .. it doesn't make much sense, and we should
> be triaging those out of the system tray if at all possible.
>
> this will mean, i think, making a way to add plasmoids that is, from
> the user, non-distinguishable from launching an application. should
> be hard to do, really (using the existing plasma-applet-*.desktop
> files even), but would need to get done.

Hi Aaron,

this sounds good. It is not really what I had in mind, and also doesn't 
seem like "the plasma way" to me (yes, I'm aware of the irony of 
pointing that out to you :-), but I don't want to interfere with 
implementation and code too much, after all I'm not writing it.

I will just return to my scenarios, where I will try to sketch out, how 
I think humans should use computers. And I will also try to show, how 
they can do it without systemtrays.

michael