VDG suggestions and wishes about the system tray

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Wednesday 27 August 2014 06:02:11 Philipp Stefan wrote: 
> >> If the status notifiers are used like we intend them to, then the
> >> "passive" status really does not provide any benefit for the user any
> >> more. For example, if a music player idles, because the playlist has
> >> ended, then there's no difference between closing the window and
> >> reviving it again with the status notifier, or closing it and opening it
> >> again with KRunner, kickoff etc.
> > 
> > This goes into the very broad topic of application life-
> > cycle. The technical reality right now is that we do need
> > to explicitly communicate lifecycle state to users because
> > we don't have perfect state serialization - whether an app
> > is running or not matters, because it may not come back up
> > in the same state as when it was quit.
> 
> Hmm, could you give me some examples for applications with status
> notifiers that handles this that way? I mean, sure applications like
> Inkscape and LibreOffice won't start up in the same state like when they
> were closed, however, applications like them don't seem to use status
> notifiers. I found that mostly media centred applications and those that
> provide background functionality like update notifiers seem to use
> status notifiers. Most of the ones I saw had a way or another to realize
> a state that is consistent with when you close the application. The only
> difference was startup time, but that's another story. I see your
> concern though.

there's a technical difference: with the status notifiers the applications do 
not quit. They continue to run and only the main window gets hidden which can 
easily be restored.

What you want is to quit it, but that requires application life cycle to get 
the application back to the state where you left it. In reality this does not 
exist (yet).

Overall I'm with Eike here in this discussion. Just from my experience: people 
want to use the system tray as a kind of task bar for some windows. I 
regularly get bug reports about it not working or not working as expected. I 
don't like this taskbar feature of the system tray but we cannot deny that 
it's a real use case and we would piss off large numbers of users if we remove 
the support for passive notifiers (not to think about all the old xembed items 
we transform to systemtray icons). What's important to notice is that there 
are applications which would break if you remove it.

Please start to look at it from the other side. Look at what the applications 
provide in the system tray icon and why they are doing it. Then come up with 
an idea how to solve the use case, which we can then implement and after that 
deprecate the usage in the system tray.

My personal suggestion (which won't surprise anyone on this list) is to move 
the application status notifiers into the tasks applet. But that's not a 
really easy task and would not interact well with the remaining tasks. From my 
experience it's obvious that users don't want their ktorrent to take up any 
useable space from other applications, but it needs to be easily reachable 
when they want to interact with it.

Cheers
Martin
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