RE: Fwd: Guidelines for System Tray icons

>-- Original Message --
>Subject: RE: Fwd: Guidelines for System Tray icons
>From: Mark McLoughlin <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
>Date: 14 Mar 2003 12:32:30 +1300

>> This might not be the greatest solution, but IMO you render the trayba=
r
>> useless if you remove this feature.
>
>	Is this the most important feature of the tray? Is the status
>information provided by the icons not more important? It depends on your=

>interpretation of what the tray is, of course :-)

Indeed :-)

Instead of replying directly to your mail, i will try to explain why i pr=
efer
the trayicons to small applets, and sometimes to minimizing an applicatio=
n.
(Let me see if i can make more sense this time :P)

For me the traybar is all about convinience. It doesn't do anything a sta=
nd
alone applet couldn't do. But IMO it does it better.

The traybar has the following properties tha applets do not (in KDE at le=
ast)

1) You can move all the embeded icons at once.
2) Each individual icon does not have an applet handle.
3) They have a standard size.
4) If the panel is tall enough then the icons will be displayed in rows.
5) When a new icon appears it will always appear in the traybar.
6) When an icon disapears it doesn't leave a "hole" between the other ico=
ns,
but the other icons move together.
7) The icons are small :-)

I don't know about you, but i have never seen an applet that appears when=

a program is running, and disapears when it is not. And if the applicatio=
ns,
like juk and kmix, were altered to use appelts instead of tray icons, the=
n
1, 2, 4, 5, 6 would be annoying, at least to me.

1. Might be possible in KDE already, bit as far as i know, neither of the=

other issues are.

So why don't i think a simple minimize is good enough? Because minimized
applications takes up space in the in the task list, and they take up a
lot more space in that list than they do as an icon in the traybar.

So basically i find the traybar to be a very convinient place to put icon=
s
for programs mainly running in the background, and be able to do a basic
control of those applications without calling up the interface.

I know many people probably make use of multiple desktops for this kind
of thing, but despite trying to learn using those properly, i have not ma=
naged
to do so in the 5 or so years i have used various unix systems.

So when one is only really using one desktop, yet has a tendency to open
quite a lot of windows, then one appreciates the possibility to hide the
media player, the mixer, the KOrganizer alarm daemon (kalarm), the icq wi=
ndow,
and other things that i don't really interact with frequently enough to
want a window open all the time, yet dont want to lose easy access to the=
m,
or quit them.

I still think their "notification" effect is important as well, but i see=

this mainly as a way for said hidden applications to tell me that somethi=
ng
interesting happened. But until something happens, i would like the appli=
cations
to just be out of the way of my other work, and do their thing in the bac=
kground.
And very much preferably without filling up my task list. IMO, the tray
bar is the perfect place for this, especially as i don't always have thes=
e
things running, and when they aren't running, i don't want to see their
icon there. I just can't see how you could ever make this work as nicely
with applets, without basically making them behave exactly like the curre=
nt
traybar, in which case i can't see why the current implementation cant be=

used as it is right now.

Mvh
Troels