VDG suggestions and wishes about the system tray

[Philipp Stefan]

Hello everyone,

the VDG told me to take a look at the system tray after the 5.0 
releases, because even though it's a huge step forward, we felt that 
there are some inconsistencies in how it behaves. My task was to 
identify these issues and come up with possible solutions. We talked 
about them already and think it is now time to come forwards with our 
suggestions. If these ideas are accepted we'll deliver guidelines on how 
to integrate an application nicely into the system tray.


      Status Notifiers

Current status:

  * Passive ones often don't provide useful services (as intended by the
    specification)

  * Other DEs hide them [passive notifiers] completely

  * Some applications can only be resumed after clicking the notifier in
    the popup

One key problem I have found is that status notifiers are somewhat 
abused on the desktop. Plasma migrates status notifiers that are in a 
"passive" state into the system tray popup. The specification mentions 
that this state should only be used when the applications does nothing 
of interest. Many applications follow that line of thought, some don't.
The question is, when the notifiers don't do anything interesting in 
their passive state, then why show them at all? I don't think that the 
process of terminating an applications warrants the need for their own 
notifier. Unity, the only other DE to my knowledge that uses status 
notifiers, hides these too. We think that is a sensible approach. It 
would de-clutter the system tray popup and provide a more consistent 
behaviour in general.
Our dream system tray would handle status notifier like that:

  * "Passive" notifiers would be hidden completely, there's no way to
    interact with them
  *   "Active" notifiers reside in the panel area of the system tray
  * "NeedsAttention" notifiers change their icon. We'd recommend a
    change of color

This would, of course, break some applications like KTorrent. How would 
it behave ideally? When you open KTorren and there are no torrents 
configured there should not be an indicator as the applications simply 
does nothing for now (passive). As soon as one adds a torrent a 
notifiers should be shown (active). The user can then close or minimize 
the window and do what they do. When a torrent finishes downloading the 
status of the indicator should change to "needsAttention" to notify the 
user that the download has finished. If the user then does not remove 
the torrent from KTorrent i.e. it continues seeding, the indicator 
should stay in an "active" state, not "passive" as it is now.

Because this would break some applications we think that it would be a 
good idea to announce these plans now but only enforce them in say 4 
release cycles.


      Plasmoids

Plasmoids in the system tray are those programs that draw these fancy 
looking dialogues in the system tray popup.

  * Purpose of icons in popup is not clear – often only lead to an empty
    page
  * Can not be hidden, because some the user decides what's important or not
  * Use differently coloured icons in popup, even though those different
    colours don't indicate a functional difference.

For now, (almost) all system tray plasmoids don't do anything useful 
when their icon resides in the popup, similar to status notifiers. When 
one open e.g. the network manager plasmoid and decides to check what 
this notification icon is they are greeted with "No new notifications". 
When one goes through the list it's always the same "No battery 
detected", "No removable media  found" etc.
Additionally there is/was a bug that some plasmoid icons would use a 
lighter shade of grey in the popup. This was a bit confusing as there is 
no functional difference between.

We propose to act on this bug and and desaturate the icons of plasmoids 
in the popup when the plasmoid can not provide anything of interest to 
the user e.g. no new notifications. Additionally we either want to make 
these plasmoids immune to left clicks or take the user to the 
configuration dialogue of the plasmoid upon a left click. We are not 
quite sure about that yet.
It was pointed out to us that some users may wish to change the default 
setting, so that plasmoids which hold information for the user do not 
migrate to the system tray. If the user does this, then this plasmoid 
should retain its original color in the popup. Additionally the plasmoid 
icons should be sorted from top to bottom, relevant (saturated) to 
irrelevant (desaturated).


      Expander


The expander is this little upward pointing arrow to the right of the 
system tray. We were not able to find out what the actual name of it is.
Clicking on it takes the user to an overview page, where the 
plasmoids/indicators are listed with their names and icons.
However, if our plans are to be realised then this page is not needed. 
Status notifiers will not show up in the popup and the name of plasmoids 
is easily discovered by hovering over the icon, or clicking on the icon. 
Unless someone here has any ideas what this could be uses for we would 
vote for removing this page from the system tray.

We are eager to hear what you think :)

Cheers
Phil



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