VDG suggestions and wishes about the system tray

[Eike Hein]

On 27.08.2014 06:02, Philipp Stefan wrote:
> 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.

A lot of the time state is subtle things like: The tab you
last raised, the UI element that has keyboard focus, the
scroll position of a list view, ... there's a lot of things
apps don't remember because developer side it's opt-in, you
need to explicitly wire a lot of this up without that much
support from the libraries.

That's what I meant with the platform angle on the topic of
application lifecycle - mobile platforms often implement a
"the system reserves the right to kill the application at
any time" model because of resource constraints and avail-
ability guarantees. That means they had to give applications
the support to cope with this, and train developers to be
aware of the concerns. As a by-product apps on these plat-
forms often no longer have an explicit "it's running" state
in the UI, nor an explicit Quit action (but you also see
a lot of apps that don't fit this idea well and end up
fighting the system to stay alive).

OS X is the primary desktop operating system that has
attempted to bring this model to the desktop so far, with
OS X 10.7 in 2011 introducing significant new APIs and
changes for the process model and the document model[1].
A lot of that ended up getting rolled back in 10.8 (some
of it even in point releases) because it didn't work well
in practice. So it's not easy.

1 = Pages 6 & 7 of http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/7/ 
are a good read.


Cheers,
Eike