Re: Guidelines for System Tray icons

Hi Waldo,

On Thu, 2003-03-13 at 23:44, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> There has recently been some discussion within KDE about this very issue, see:
> 
> http://lists.kde.org/?t=104414525400003&r=1&w=2

	I'm glad to see its not only us GNOME folks who are a bit confused by
"what *exactly* is the thing for?" :-)

	Reading through the mails, though, I think we're both leaning towards
similar ideas ...

> One of the points made in that thread is that the system tray serves two 
> purposes:
> 1) to communicate status
> 2) to provide quick access to functionality
> 
> Now, the name "Notification Area" suggests that the original goal within GNOME 
> was limited to 1). Below it is suggested that for 2) people should use 
> "custom applets". But such custom applet should be shown somewhere as well, 
> shouldn't it? Does this mean there is a second area reserved for custom 
> applets?
> 
> The purposes 1) and 2) can be strongly related. Take for an example an instant 
> messaging client. Here there is a desire to communicate status information 
> such as "connected to the IM network" and "have new messages" to the user. At 
> the same time there is a need to provide the user with quick access to 
> functionality such as sending a new message.

	I think the stance we're leaning towards in GNOME is not

	"The Notification Area is only for status information"

	but rather

	"The Notification Area's primary purpose is for status"

	i.e. you only provide an icon in the Notification Area if there is some
genuinely useful status information you want to provide to the user.
Inherent in this, you will most likely provide quick access to
functionality related to that status .... but the primary purpose isn't
to provide quick access to your application.

	I think that's fairly sane. Static icons communicating no status
information (other than that the application is running) seems rather
useless to me.

	(By custom applet, I just mean an arbitrary group of widgets that you
can add to the panel which is related to an application. E.g. a mail
program could provide an applet which is a "New" button with a drop down
list to choose between "New Message", "New Appointment", "New Contact"
etc. I don't think this is something that belongs in the systray.
Indeed, this is a pretty special purpose applet which only hard code
users of the application would want on their panel.)

Good Luck,
Mark.