Stop abusing the notification area

[Lubos Lunak]

On Friday 24 of June 2005 21:58, Yaron Tausky wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I proposed in a recent discussion on the GNOME desktop-devel-list [1] a
> new way to tackle the need for running certain apps in the background
> (e.g. music player, IM, etc.), since currently people are abusing the
> notification area for that. Aside from the hackish nature of this
> approach, it is also a usabilty nightmare -- compare the ways Gaim,
> Muine and Rhythmbox handle their notification area docks to see what I
> mean. Therefore, my idea consists of two suggestions:

 Hmm. Haven't you by a chance been browsing the KDE mailing list archives 
recently :) ?

http://lists.kde.org/?t=111726992600001&r=1&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?t=111358772000004&r=1&w=2

> 2. Add a WM API which would enable windows to add menu items to the WM
> action menu (appears when you right-click the window in the taskbar on
> GNOME). Together with the first suggestion, we should get a fairly good
> implementaion of app docking, plus standard behaviour for every app
> (i.e. right-click to bring the menu, left-click to show/minimize window,
> close to quit the application). A little mockup I gimped up is available
> [2].
> This suggestion, however, is quite complicated to implement. The
> application would have to post its specific menu item to the WM (in a
> cross-toolkit manner!) since we would have to merge them with the
> standard window options (e.g. close, minimize, etc.). We could go the
> other way around, but then we would have to rely on the developers' good
> will -- this is too prone to abuse. The same problem appears to come up
> with cross-desktop applets [3], so we should probably have a unified
> convention for posting menus to another processes.

 Possible, but not simple, and it'd be always limited. It seems much simpler 
to have just "show your menu" message.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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