Stop abusing the notification area

[Mike Hearn]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:58:44 +0300, Yaron Tausky wrote:
> I'd like to hear opinions and comments about this, since I know that I'm
> not the only one who's fed up with the notification area abuse. ;-)

I'm not sure about attempting to merge menus, as previously noted, but the
general idea of shrinking the task bar icon is sound and has been floated
before. Generally you just want to send a message to the window when it's
clicked and let it do its own thing - this is what Windows does at any
rate. Often, a tray icon is not representing a window anyway, it's just a
convenient mechanism to keep the app present on screen at all times so you
can quickly access it so not merging menus doesn't matter.

The most important thing for you to do now is implement it. The right way
to get this to happen is:

a) Post an email asking for feedback - good, you already did this
b) Assuming no feedback or positive feedback, do it

Doing it, in this context, means writing a quick extension to the EWMH
spec, then writing patches for the GNOME and KDE Panels, then writing some
example code for how to do it and/or writing patches for GTK+ and Qt so
application developers can easily access the new functionality.

If you aren't a programmer yourself, find one who can do this stuff and
recruit them.

BTW the second part of deprecating the system tray is popup
notifications, as that's often what tray icons are *supposed* to be used
for. Christian Hammond and myself are working on a system for that. There
is a spec, but there's not much point trying to make it a de-jure standard
before making it a de-facto standard.

thanks -mike