Hey,
During the sprint here in Barcelona, we've talked about the rework of the
notification area / systemtray and had a critical look at its concept and
direction. I've extracted some notes from it, which I plan to address in the
coming weeks. Here's a quick run-down:
Goal of the system tray: Showing messages, hardware status and system status
This includes:
- Essential hardware interaction (e.g. network, battery, brightness)
- Essential system interaction (notifications, running jobs)
- Social / messages / email status
(This means we explicitely don't see the system tray as a taskbar replacement)
One question that came up: How can we remove stuff that doesn't belong here
(according to above definition) elsewhere? Some ideas:
- When no devices are plugged in, the device notifier should be completely
hidden
- No bluetooth device -> no icon for bluetooth
- The menu popup of statusnotifieritems should go into the systray popup
- We should be able to dbus-activate plasmoids (so for example, when a
bluetooth device is plugged in, the systray can load a plasmoid)
- The systray can override statusnotifiers with plasmoids, allowing an
improved functionality for some apps
- the calendar should move into the systray popup
Calendar-related changes:
- Calendar events should only be shown when Akonadi is running, otherwise, the
interface can be collapsed there.
- the event view becomes "Day's details"
- Adding an event should be possible directly from the calendar
The XEmbed systemtray mechanism will not be supported anymore, instead we will
attempt to merge support for statusnotifieritems into Qt (for QSystemTray).
Other desktops are going a similar route.
We would like to redesign Klipper's functionality to make it more integrated.
This will likely result in a reimplementation of Klipper as Plasmoid.
Some applications nest in the systemtray, and appear in both taskbar and
systemtray. We'd like to merge their entries. Example: Kmail's taskbar item
could show the number of unread emails as an overlay, instead of having a
separate icon in the systray.
Overall, the direction of systemtray was met positively.
This is quite a lot of work, and perhaps not achievable in one go. We'll see
about this in the coming weeks, I'll work on the items in a way that
prioritizes for impact and stability.
Feedback, as usual, welcome. :)
--
sebas
http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9
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