On 21 April 2010 22:44, Matthew Paul Thomas <m...@canonical.com> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi folks > > On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our > plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu > by 11.04. <http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/> > > Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too. > <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/347> > > Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on > either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we > completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have > suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother? > > Thanks > - -- > Matthew Paul Thomas > http://mpt.net.nz/ > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ > > iEYEARECAAYFAkvPY54ACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecq3sACdGAU4JvHlUtSaG/cmojKthtHw > HlUAnjQ/1RMW7pN+WU9AAikQH2yligi3 > =+RNZ > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > Hello,
The ideas sound great to me! It makes a lot of sense, both from a design perspective as well as from a user perspective, to have a single, consistent way to access common tasks. However, something that I am afraid of is that it might turn out that this great plan will end up meaning a lot of duplicating work with regards to GNOME Shell and GNOME 3.0. There are plans for the notification area and systems in GNOME Shell and they might not be fully compatible with Ubuntu. Canonical could of course propose to do the notification part of GNOME 3.0 and make Ayatana a part of it, but I feel that a lot of people would be very unhappy with that. Remains tricky business, but I do think that Ubuntu has both the legal and the moral right to adapt GNOME to its wishes, so if it is decided to use a heavily modified GNOME version, why not? The unified notificators would provide a wonderful way to integrate the user's application of choice in the system. Ubuntu chooses a default set of applications and of course the system should integrate with them well. They were chosen for a reason and they are installed by default, so it makes sense to give integrating them preference over integrating everything. But I do think that it should be possible to make other applications the default subjects of the notificators. Furthermore, users often don't care much what the name of their application is, they just want the same icon and the same way of accessing the same type of information. You might have experienced the panic of some Windows users when the blue 'E' had disappeared from their desktops: they had started to associate the logo of Internet Explorer with the Internet. Considering the two things I mentioned above I think I agree with the approach used in Indicator Messages, that the best way to implement the notificators would be by using the category or the type of the information the notificator is providing access to. This would require a solid defaults API and this would make the notificators the default way to access the default application for thing X. Other applications could use this. Another advantage is that it would (or could) provide easy access to default resources. Examples: a download manager or a status menu could be read and modified by applications wanting to manipulate that information. The notificators would make sure the rest of the system would be reached as well and that everything gets nicely integrated into the system. Mark already said that DBus has been chosen as the way to communicate. A very sound decision if you want to allow different applications to be the default. If they all use the same protocol it's just a matter of switching address and the default has been changed with the user noticing it. I would like to end with saying that I appreciate the effort made my the Design Team to improve the communication with the rest of the Ubuntu Community. Writing blog posts and managing discussions like these cost a lot of time and energy, but it is vital to being listened to. It would be a shame if this wonderful ideas would end up being thoroughly disliked by parts of the community just because they feel the changes are forced upon them, and not necessarily because they don't agree. Thank you! Regards, -- Sense Hofstede [ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də] _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
