Hello all, Under the light of the Christmas spirit, I'd like to kickoff some discussions I was thinking about for a long time now. Hopefully you'll pick up at least some of them. :)
1 - Application indicators optional by design. The goals of application indicators are very ambitious, as they replace the systray as we know it today. With that in mind, I see them as a very good opportunity to solve a problem that has been plaguing the Desktop for years: applications shoving tray icons down our throats. Unless the application resides *only* in the tray (e.g. nm-applet), I firmly believe a tray icon should be optional. If your application needs a tray icon to work properly, you are doing it wrong. So I believe it would be very interesting if, by design, any application using libappindicator could be placed or removed from the tray according to the wishes of the user. I believe "not forcing" should be even a part of the spec. 2 - Evolution and Ayatana Seeing in the comments in https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-indicator/+bug/353007 https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-indicator/+bug/460483 I'm starting to wonder whether the goals of Ayatana are being limited by the Evolution plugin API. For example, it is difficult to pass message header information to notifications or implement close-to-tray functionality. Being a faithful Evolution user, I never entered the "Thunderbird by default" bandwagon, but from an Ayatana perspective, Thunderbird's friendliness to extensions look very attractive. Of course, it creates a whole new set of problems such as integration with panel clock... 3 - Raising awareness Reading the Ubuntu forums, I noticed two interesting things. One: a lot of people have no idea of the rationale behind certain Ayatana decisions (e.g. the new bubble position in Karmic, how the indicator-applet works, etc.). Two: once explained, a lot of those people like the ideas. I believe it is important to think about some kind of systematic and efficient way of make users aware of what has changed and is being experimented during the alphas. It would, at the very least, reduce the number of "the notification bubble seems lower than it should" bug reports. Merry Christmas to all! _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
