Systemtray breakout notes

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 16 January 2014, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> During the sprint here in Barcelona, we've talked about the rework of the
> notification area / systemtray and had a critical look at its concept and
> direction. I've extracted some notes from it, which I plan to address in
> the coming weeks. Here's a quick run-down:
> 
> Goal of the system tray: Showing messages, hardware status and system
> status
> 
> This includes:
> 	- Essential hardware interaction (e.g. network, battery, brightness)
> 	- Essential system interaction (notifications, running jobs)
> 	- Social / messages / email status
> 
> (This means we explicitely don't see the system tray as a taskbar
> replacement)
> 
> One question that came up: How can we remove stuff that doesn't belong here
> (according to above definition) elsewhere? Some ideas:
> 
> - When no devices are plugged in, the device notifier should be completely
>   hidden

one thing we talked that should be added:
even better than hidden, not existing (so doesn't even take resources) and 
having creation/destruction of systray items depending on events on dbus, that 
can be:
* existence of a statusnotifieritem
* existence of an arbitrary dbus service (such as mpris)
* maybe this can be expressed by plasmoids with keys in their desktop file, 
like
ActivationType:dbus
ActivationName:org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.*

ActivationType:statusnotifier
ActivationName:org.kde.bluedevil

> - the calendar should move into the systray popup
I can already see many problems with it, but what about:
- the systray area takes up the clock
- the expander button is what now is the toolbox button

it generates the problem of how to get to panel configuration and what about 
when the systray is moved, what about when the clock is outside, what about 
other panels...

I'm not sure they are solvable problems, but would look neat

Cheers, 
Marco Martin