Systemtray breakout notes

[Àlex Fiestas]

On Thursday 16 January 2014 19:38:30 Mark Gaiser wrote:
> > The XEmbed systemtray mechanism will not be supported anymore, instead we
> > will attempt to merge support for statusnotifieritems into Qt (for
> > QSystemTray). Other desktops are going a similar route.
> 
> Please don't use excuses as "Other desktops are going a similar
> route.". They might, but they suck at doing it in my opinion.
> I'm guessing you aim at windows 8 and perhaps gnome here. Otherwise,
> please do share more details.

We are only dropping XEmded, this doesn't mean dropping all application system 
trays but only the ones that don't support any modern way of doing it. Meaning 
that only old apps, Java, and some other old stuff will break.

As for other apps using statusnotifier the idea is to merge this in the taskbar 
(or at least try and see what happens) and save the systemtray only for things 
that belong to the system, system being whatever we want it to be.

BTW, the reason to drop XEmbded is that it is too complicated to integrate it 
right and even if we do it literally doesn't scale (since the windows have 
fixed size), so the result is something like this:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/search.jpg
Notice the dropbox icon.

So let's see if we can move systemtray forward on freedesktop, we might need 
to implement GNOME's in case they are not using statusnotifier (iirc gnome-
shell is has support for it already).