VDG suggestions and wishes about the system tray

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 28 August 2014 12:14:28 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Thursday, August 28, 2014 12:08:04 Martin Klapetek wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> > 
> > On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 22:00:54 Eike Hein wrote:
> > > Hiding "passive" status notifier items robs the user of an
> > > entire tier of organization when deciding how near/far they
> > > want to place a running app.
> > 
> > This may also encourage more abuse: i.e. not setting the status to hidden,
> > ever. Remember that we're often dealing with apps who want to forego being
> > shown in the taskbar (presumably to save space). Effectively, this means
> > that apps will set their status to always be active, leading to more
> > clutter in the panel.
> > 
> > On the other hand, it's how Unity (and maybe others?) work for years.
> > Let's
> > find out if it was a real problem for them and about how many apps are
> > they
> > aware of abusing this?
> 
> Ah, yes, thought about that, too.
> 
> I agree that it could be tried, but I wouldn't be surprised if for Plasma,
> we come to a different conclusion. There's a certain difference in the
> "audiences" between Unity and Plasma, and that might very well manifest
> itself in apps having problems with this behaviour in Plasma (those that
> don't care about Unity). On the other hand, more consistent behaviour
> between statusnotifier implementations is probably a good thing.

I just looked up the draft specification (since there is no final one yet) 
from our side [1] and looky what I found:

"Passive: The item doesn't convey important information to the user, it can be 
considered an "idle" status and is likely that visualizations will chose to 
hide it."

Yes, that doesn't say that Plasma will definitely hide passive SNIs, but 
according to this specification, developers should actually _expect_ 
visualizations to hide passive SNIs. So,  according to this specification, 
applications that rely on passive SNIs _not_ to be hidden are clearly doing it 
wrong, and we could hit them over the head with the spec if they complain.

[1] http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/statusnotifieritem.html