New property proposal for StatusNotifierItem protocol: Label

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On August 10, 2010, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> I think this would give more flexibility and I can see a use for this
> new property in a few KDE applications, KMail and Choqok for example
> could use it to show the message count, the keyboard layout indicator
> could use it as well.
> 
> What do you think?

i think it's only really useful if there is a reliable way to show the text.
placing it next to the iconic representation is probably the only way to do
this reliably given that icons can be very small and it's nearly impossible
to tell where it is appropriate to overlay text onto a random icon without
 knowing something about its visual contents. is that what you are planning?

i am concerned about abuse of this property by items that will set long
texts: "131 emails". if there is a guarantee to the user of the
StatusNotifierItem API that their text will be shown, then we'll end up with
fairly nasty looking layouts in the system tray. (this will particularly
 look bad with multi-row trays)

one of the problems we've faced in the past with the system tray is app
authors putting all sorts of things that do not particularly belong in
there. they have traditionally abused the system tray for items that really
want to be showing a larger set of information with richer interaction than
can be comfortably accomodated for given what the tray is required to
 support.

looking at the use cases provided, is there really a need for such
 text?

for plasma, the battery is a proper plugin / applet. (and even then, by
default it doesn't show text in the tray.) for the rest of the entries, we
rely on graphical cues for status change and the tooltips to communicate
details. is it important to see that you have 1045 emails at all times in
the system tray? i also wonder how an email client would give a useful
 LabelGuide (i suppose it wouldn't)

the keyboard layout indicator is probably the best / most defensible use
case provided. i wonder if that also doesn't belong as a proper applet in
 the panel, though.

i'm not 100% opposed to the idea if there are hard use cases that simply
can't be done without it, but i think there are a number of caveats and i am
quite confident that we'll end up with situations where the results are
 visually poor.

back in gnome 1.x and early gnome 2.x days there was a system tray icon for
showing network traffic that would place an icon and a label in the x window
that would get embedded. it's the kind of things people do when you give
them the flexibility to do so. when designing these things, we need to think
not only of how we will use them in our own goodies, but how 3rd parties are
 going to use them and what our commitments become given the API we offer.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks

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