Proposing the StatusNotifier specification

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On January 6, 2010, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > StatusItem would be probably ok-ish
> > too, but not significantly better than StatusNotifierItem
> > a Status notifier item is a thing that notifies about the status of an
> > application, so even if not totally pretty is a name that seems to make
> > perfect sense.
> 
> Well, a status item is a thing that displays the status of an
> application. I didn't read the spec carefully, but the intro states:
> 
> "This specification defines the management of visual items, usually
> icons used for reporting the status of an application to the user or
> provide a quick access to common actions performed by that application."
> 
> It's certainly not just about an item that "notifies".

that's correct. it's about an item that notifies the user about the status of 
something; the logical progression is to allow the user to do something in 
response to that. we're actively discouraging the use of the system tray / 
notification area for things that aren't status identifiers, and so emphasized 
that aspect of it in the name. 

"status item" is really rather generic, "notifier" isn't quite accurate and is 
confusing with notifications (a complimentary, but also slightly different 
thing) ... so we settled (after several discussions on a number of mailing 
lists over the course of a few months) on this name. we had feedback on it 
from distributions, 3rd party application developers and various and sundry 
people who write with KDE and Gtk+ ...

i thin the name is good enough as is, and without turning it into a full 
sentence i don't think we'll find something "better". the name is the easy 
thing to discuss, though, relative to the actual spec so it's what people tend 
to discuss. it's the "what colour is the bikeshed" part of this spec ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks