Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Hash: SHA1

Scott Ritchie wrote on 15/06/10 04:29:
>
> On 06/14/2010 12:31 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>...
>> You mentioned at UDS that before Wine began inserting notification
>> area items into the Gnome notification area, it put them in a
>> separate window. I suggest that it return to doing that. Java
>> applications will be in the same situation.
>
> I'm worried that if we still have empty space in the top panel and then
> present a window not in the top panel users will immediately wonder why
> the window isn't just embedded in the panel like it used to be (and is
> on Windows.)
>
> A window also has the normal inconveniences: to interact with it it
> must first be focused on.  It will also be very small (holding only a
> single icon of content in most cases, too small for window controls).
>
> A window also means we need to worry about what to title it in the
> bottom bar - for a user who doesn't even know they're running Wine,
> spawning a "Wine System Tray" in the background and on the bottom is
> likely to be missed.  Populating an item in the bottom bar also means
> we'll have less space available for other apps - In fact I'm reasonably
> certain we waste less space in the top panel than the bottom panel by
> just using the system tray icons.
>
> Basically, there's a reason Wine stopped using the systray window.
>...

Fair enough. I've now specified that the Unity menu bar should have a
notification area only for Wine and Java applications that don't know
any better. 

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Scott Kitterman]

"Frederik Nnaji"  wrote:

>>
>> Real shortly then: broken but not-yet-replaceable applications needs two
>> things from their indicators:
>>
>> 1. to  be able to interact left/right click etc
>> 2. to be able to be seen at all times
>>
>> That's it. Otherwise they break the *experience*. As described, above. Not
>>  unusable, but it's a definite regression, and as I see so far it seems
>> mostly just "because", and I think it's a bit strange when it doesn't make
>> it fit more into the whole anyway.
>>
>
>that's your POV, not necessarily fact.
>Fact is, we are bringing consistency and design to the panel.
>I see nothing wrong with keeping notification area as a panel applet you can
>install manuall, e.g. when installing Wine.
>
>Things change all the time, and apps have to adapt to that all the time,
>regression is perhaps the correct term for this, but this is not an error,
>since we are well aware of it.
>
A regression is still a regression even if it's on purpose. The problem is that 
often one person's feature is another person's regression. 

Scott K

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

>
> Real shortly then: broken but not-yet-replaceable applications needs two
> things from their indicators:
>
> 1. to  be able to interact left/right click etc
> 2. to be able to be seen at all times
>
> That's it. Otherwise they break the *experience*. As described, above. Not
>  unusable, but it's a definite regression, and as I see so far it seems
> mostly just "because", and I think it's a bit strange when it doesn't make
> it fit more into the whole anyway.
>

that's your POV, not necessarily fact.
Fact is, we are bringing consistency and design to the panel.
I see nothing wrong with keeping notification area as a panel applet you can
install manuall, e.g. when installing Wine.

Things change all the time, and apps have to adapt to that all the time,
regression is perhaps the correct term for this, but this is not an error,
since we are well aware of it.


> I never said there couldn't be a new way of doing it, only that those
> suggested does not fulfill the need. Keep on keeping on.
>
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

Now, moving on with the discussion itself:

> Real shortly then: broken but not-yet-replaceable applications needs
> two things from their indicators:
> 
> 1. to  be able to interact left/right click etc
> 2. to be able to be seen at all times

Instead of keeping the notification area *exactly* as it is or hiding
it entirely inside an indicator menu, one possible middle-ground
alternative is creating a space for Wine icons that behave the same
way as the Windows 7 Notification Area.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511448.aspx

Gnome/Ubuntu rejected this kind of fine-grained control over the
years with the argument that it's better to prevent NA abuse to
begin with. The guidelines for using using libappindicator (kinda)
prevent this for happening with native apps, but with Windows
apps this is impossible to enforce, so perhaps it's more acceptable.




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> I am calm. And I don't think there is a conspiracy. I have no idea why
> someone would put those words in my mouth, but oh well...

That was a tongue-in-cheek comment and not meant to be taken seriously.
Sorry if you felt I was putting words in your mouth. :(

> I am only (repeat-)explaining why the proposed solutions are (today)
> more or less unacceptable, since it's apparent that people keeping on
> pushing it are not affected themselves and thus don't see the problem.

That was my point with the "conspiracy" comment. Nobody is "pushing"
anything. People are proposing things and asking for opinions. Heck,
one of the mockups was proposed by me and I'm as close to be an
official Ubuntu developer as my carpet is, so "pushing" is really
too strong of a word. :)

I was asking for opinions. You gave them, and I thank you for that.
I just wanted clarify that I *do* care about your case.




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Kristoffer Lundén]

2010/6/16 Conscious User 

>
> Kristoffer, calm down.
> [...]

There is no evil conspiracy to break your desktop experience, just a
> desire to see if there are any improvement possibilities that are being
> overlooked.
>
>
I am calm. And I don't think there is a conspiracy. I have no idea why
someone would put those words in my mouth, but oh well...

I am only (repeat-)explaining why the proposed solutions are (today) more or
less unacceptable, since it's apparent that people keeping on pushing it are
not affected themselves and thus don't see the problem.

Real shortly then: broken but not-yet-replaceable applications needs two
things from their indicators:

1. to  be able to interact left/right click etc
2. to be able to be seen at all times

That's it. Otherwise they break the *experience*. As described, above. Not
 unusable, but it's a definite regression, and as I see so far it seems
mostly just "because", and I think it's a bit strange when it doesn't make
it fit more into the whole anyway.

I never said there couldn't be a new way of doing it, only that those
suggested does not fulfill the need. Keep on keeping on.

/ K




>
> Le mercredi 16 juin 2010 à 17:14 +0200, Kristoffer Lundén a écrit :
>
>
> > It's the exact right word, since I wasn't talking about functionality.
> > Rocks are functional, but have a broken experience when it comes to
> > building houses, especially if you are used to a hammer. It may not be
> > breaking functionality (actually for icons that indicate status, it
> > does that too since it will be hidden) but it DOES break experience.
> > Regressing to a window in particular would be a horrible experience
> > and totally unacceptable. Cramming it into some kind of drop-down
> > indicator not much better, since a lot of apps communicate via these
> > old indicators.
>
> > You do realize that moving these indicators to windows or menu in no
> > way unbreaks them, or makes them conform - they will stick out just as
> > sorely, or worse. Sticking them in a menu does not make them behave
> > like the rest of the desktop, so that effort is not accomplishing
> > anything anyway. Just because all top levels are then menus does not
> > mean that the perceived experience is any more coherent - Id argue
> > that it's less coherent because it's unexpected and still does not
> > conform. I understand the initial reaction to try and fit everything
> > into the new menus, but in cases like this, the result just ends up
> > (potentially much) worse and still fool noone that it's one system.
>
> > If we choose to use Wine or Java, we expect to step outside the
> > blessed sandbox - now let us do that, please.
>
> > No. Anecdotal, of course, but I know of exactly zero people on Ubuntu
> > that does not run at least Wine to get at least Spotify which relies
> > somewhat heavily on having a systray icon. At work, I also have a Java
> > systray icon from DavMail without which I could not practically use
> > Ubuntu at work (not impossible, just much harder, esp the calendar and
> > Evolution is a crashing joke). Though the DavMail icon would suffer
> > less from being in a menu, it does communicate that it's working etc
> > by changing appearance so it's not nice to hide it in menu or window,
> > even though it's rarely important.
> >
> > The solutions here are, for Spotify: get a Linux client or provide an
> > alternative - native app, plugin to Rhythmbox etc - there's a non-free
> > library and several open efforts. And for DavMail: if it's possible
> > for Java to use the menus in a nice way, bugfiling or even patches.
> >
> > That's two examples that concern me. There's more. Steam, for
> > instance, is a huge thing when it comes to gaming in Wine, since a lot
> > of games do work well. They are rumored to release a Linux client
> > though, and at that point they could probably be petitioned to behave
> > nicely.
> >
> > Just don't break my desktop experience with what I feel is essentially
> > misdirected efforts, doing nothing to make the desktop more usable
> > while also not making it seem more coherent in any way.
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

Kristoffer, calm down.

This is a brainstorm phase. None of the ideas proposed so far were
proposed in the most polished form possible, and there are many other
possible ideas to consider.

It is a little bit premature to conclude that keeping the notification
area exactly as it is for Wine apps is the best solution based on the
fact that you didn't like two crude, unpolished suggestions. Nobody ever
claimed that those suggestions are the only possible alternatives.

It might be that you are absolutely correct and keeping the area is the
best way. Who knows? But how to reach this conclusion before a more
exhaustive discussion on alternatives?

There is no evil conspiracy to break your desktop experience, just a
desire to see if there are any improvement possibilities that are being
overlooked.


Le mercredi 16 juin 2010 à 17:14 +0200, Kristoffer Lundén a écrit :


> It's the exact right word, since I wasn't talking about functionality.
> Rocks are functional, but have a broken experience when it comes to
> building houses, especially if you are used to a hammer. It may not be
> breaking functionality (actually for icons that indicate status, it
> does that too since it will be hidden) but it DOES break experience.
> Regressing to a window in particular would be a horrible experience
> and totally unacceptable. Cramming it into some kind of drop-down
> indicator not much better, since a lot of apps communicate via these
> old indicators.

> You do realize that moving these indicators to windows or menu in no
> way unbreaks them, or makes them conform - they will stick out just as
> sorely, or worse. Sticking them in a menu does not make them behave
> like the rest of the desktop, so that effort is not accomplishing
> anything anyway. Just because all top levels are then menus does not
> mean that the perceived experience is any more coherent - Id argue
> that it's less coherent because it's unexpected and still does not
> conform. I understand the initial reaction to try and fit everything
> into the new menus, but in cases like this, the result just ends up
> (potentially much) worse and still fool noone that it's one system.

> If we choose to use Wine or Java, we expect to step outside the
> blessed sandbox - now let us do that, please.

> No. Anecdotal, of course, but I know of exactly zero people on Ubuntu
> that does not run at least Wine to get at least Spotify which relies
> somewhat heavily on having a systray icon. At work, I also have a Java
> systray icon from DavMail without which I could not practically use
> Ubuntu at work (not impossible, just much harder, esp the calendar and
> Evolution is a crashing joke). Though the DavMail icon would suffer
> less from being in a menu, it does communicate that it's working etc
> by changing appearance so it's not nice to hide it in menu or window,
> even though it's rarely important.
>  
> The solutions here are, for Spotify: get a Linux client or provide an
> alternative - native app, plugin to Rhythmbox etc - there's a non-free
> library and several open efforts. And for DavMail: if it's possible
> for Java to use the menus in a nice way, bugfiling or even patches.
> 
> That's two examples that concern me. There's more. Steam, for
> instance, is a huge thing when it comes to gaming in Wine, since a lot
> of games do work well. They are rumored to release a Linux client
> though, and at that point they could probably be petitioned to behave
> nicely.
> 
> Just don't break my desktop experience with what I feel is essentially
> misdirected efforts, doing nothing to make the desktop more usable
> while also not making it seem more coherent in any way.




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Kristoffer Lundén]

2010/6/16 Conscious User 

> "Breaking" is too strong of a word. Putting Wine/Java icons in a
> separate window or indicator menu would make them suboptimal,
> sure, but still fully functional.
>
>
It's the exact right word, since I wasn't talking about functionality. Rocks
are functional, but have a broken experience when it comes to building
houses, especially if you are used to a hammer. It may not be breaking
functionality (actually for icons that indicate status, it does that too
since it will be hidden) but it DOES break experience. Regressing to a
window in particular would be a horrible experience and totally
unacceptable. Cramming it into some kind of drop-down indicator not much
better, since a lot of apps communicate via these old indicators.

You do realize that moving these indicators to windows or menu in no way
unbreaks them, or makes them conform - they will stick out just as sorely,
or worse. Sticking them in a menu does not make them behave like the rest of
the desktop, so that effort is not accomplishing anything anyway. Just
because all top levels are then menus does not mean that the perceived
experience is any more coherent - Id argue that it's less coherent because
it's unexpected and still does not conform. I understand the initial
reaction to try and fit everything into the new menus, but in cases like
this, the result just ends up (potentially much) worse and still fool noone
that it's one system.

If we choose to use Wine or Java, we expect to step outside the blessed
sandbox - now let us do that, please.

So the question is: can Wine/Java apps be considered cornercase-y
> enough for this sub-optimality to be accepted?
>

No. Anecdotal, of course, but I know of exactly zero people on Ubuntu that
does not run at least Wine to get at least Spotify which relies somewhat
heavily on having a systray icon. At work, I also have a Java systray icon
from DavMail without which I could not practically use Ubuntu at work (not
impossible, just much harder, esp the calendar and Evolution is a crashing
joke). Though the DavMail icon would suffer less from being in a menu, it
does communicate that it's working etc by changing appearance so it's not
nice to hide it in menu or window, even though it's rarely important.

The solutions here are, for Spotify: get a Linux client or provide an
alternative - native app, plugin to Rhythmbox etc - there's a non-free
library and several open efforts. And for DavMail: if it's possible for Java
to use the menus in a nice way, bugfiling or even patches.

That's two examples that concern me. There's more. Steam, for instance, is a
huge thing when it comes to gaming in Wine, since a lot of games do work
well. They are rumored to release a Linux client though, and at that point
they could probably be petitioned to behave nicely.

Just don't break my desktop experience with what I feel is essentially
misdirected efforts, doing nothing to make the desktop more usable while
also not making it seem more coherent in any way.

Thanks.

/ K
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> Well, I don't think that's the question at all. We already have a
> near-optimal solution to this in sticking the old-style notification
> area alongside the new indicator applet. An optimal one would be some
> kind of indicator that gave good UX and integrated nicely with the
> indicator applet. 

> The question is more, "how can we fix this to provide the best user
> experience?", rather than than "how many people will be affected by us
> implementing a bad user experience (moving to a window)?" We should be
> trying to improve the situation, not make it worse for the people that
> do use Wine and Java apps.


Wait, I think you and Jeremy are missing my point. I'm not proposing a
separate window or a "Wine indicator" as an attempt to get rid of the
notification area at all costs, even when it's the best possible
solution. It's quite the opposite: I do *not* believe it's the best
possible solution and I proposed the previous mockup because I think it
can be an *improvement* over it.

My previous post referred to the fact that the inability to patch Wine
applications makes impossible to have an optimal solution (using
libappindicator), so we *will* end up with a sub-optimal one. That does
not mean that *any* sub-optimal solution, like keeping the current
notification area, is equally acceptable. Some sub-optimal solutions are
better than others.

How? I'm not entirely sure and it's open for discussion. But here's a
small random example: one of the problems with the notification area is
that there is not a single, uniform system for keyboard shortcuts. With
indicators, you can have a single shortcut for accessing the
indicator-applet menu and navigate with arrows from there.

Now, pushing wine icons inside a "Wine indicator" wouldn't completely
get rid of the problem, but would allow us to have some sort of standard
like: inside the Wine indicator, we can navigate through the tray icons
there with the arrow keys and key Z simulates left-click, key X
simulates middle-click and key C simulates right-click.

Not the best possible example in the world, I know, but hopefully it
illustrates my point. :)




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 16 June 2010 12:28, Conscious User  wrote:

>
>
> > Well, any closed but not replaceable application that can't or won't
> > adapt, as well as any open application that has yet to be fixed. The
> > latter should hopefully disappear over time (but how much time?), the
> > former also goes into the "never will "category for the purpose of
> > this discussion at least. Some software in use may not even have
> > developers or even code any more.
>
> > I think the way forward is to fix all apps that are possible, via bug
> > reports and patches, and replace the rest with good alternatives over
> > time.
>
> > I don't think the way forward is to sabotage a user experience because
> > they need (or even want to) use applications which can not yet be
> > replaced, or at least yet have to receive a patch.
> >
> > I think that easy ways to conform and pointing out the benefit of
> > belonging should be enough "pressure" to adapt without actively
> > breaking applications, and probably just about as fast.
>
>
> "Breaking" is too strong of a word. Putting Wine/Java icons in a
> separate window or indicator menu would make them suboptimal,
> sure, but still fully functional.
>
> So the question is: can Wine/Java apps be considered cornercase-y
> enough for this sub-optimality to be accepted?
>
>
Well, I don't think that's the question at all. We already have a
near-optimal solution to this in sticking the old-style notification area
alongside the new indicator applet. An optimal one would be some kind of
indicator that gave good UX and integrated nicely with the indicator applet.


The question is more, "how can we fix this to provide the best user
experience?", rather than than "how many people will be affected by us
implementing a bad user experience (moving to a window)?" We should be
trying to improve the situation, not make it worse for the people that do
use Wine and Java apps.

Luke.

P.S. Scott has the stats somewhere, a very large portion of Ubuntu users use
Wine, add on Java users to that and we are talking a substantial portion of
our userbase. Granted they won't all be running apps that create tray icons
though but that's almost impossible to quantify.
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> Well, any closed but not replaceable application that can't or won't
> adapt, as well as any open application that has yet to be fixed. The
> latter should hopefully disappear over time (but how much time?), the
> former also goes into the "never will "category for the purpose of
> this discussion at least. Some software in use may not even have
> developers or even code any more.

> I think the way forward is to fix all apps that are possible, via bug
> reports and patches, and replace the rest with good alternatives over
> time.

> I don't think the way forward is to sabotage a user experience because
> they need (or even want to) use applications which can not yet be
> replaced, or at least yet have to receive a patch.
> 
> I think that easy ways to conform and pointing out the benefit of
> belonging should be enough "pressure" to adapt without actively
> breaking applications, and probably just about as fast.


"Breaking" is too strong of a word. Putting Wine/Java icons in a
separate window or indicator menu would make them suboptimal,
sure, but still fully functional.

So the question is: can Wine/Java apps be considered cornercase-y
enough for this sub-optimality to be accepted?




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Scott Ritchie]

On 04/25/2010 04:04 PM, Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 19:28 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
>> I do believe that the best balance would be to prompt the user in
>> specific moments (log-out, before suspend/lock) with a dialog that has
>> as default option to apply the updates. The tricky part here is that
>> many people are just leaving their computer on all the time and they
>> are not there when the computer sleeps or lock screen to confirm the
>> update.
>>
>> Actually I got a proposal: present the update dialog at
>> log-out/automatic suspend/lock-screen. The user can ignore (for
>> example if he/she is not there). If the user ignores it for more than
>> a certain amount of time (for example a week) present a notification
>> at login/awake/unlock that the system will apply the security update
>> at next log-out/etc (or that the user can apply it right away if
>> he/she wants).
>>
> 
> I think this is sure-fire way to make sure the updates _never_ get
> installed. On laptops, when people want to turn off or suspend, they
> want it to do so immediately, not after 10 minutes of security updates.
> I'm pretty sure the success rate of this type of prompt would be even
> lower than the blinking notification area.
> 

Yet other operating systems have found it useful to have a "shutdown
after updates install" feature, which is functionally the same.  Perhaps
there is some merit in simply doing both - pop under update manager, and
prompt them again when they shut down if they closed update manager.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Kristoffer Lundén]

2010/6/16 Conscious User 

>
> > Plus, with this mockup, you need an inidicator icon/menu for each
> > class of application that might put things in the notification area?
>
> No. Just for the corner cases that cannot use libappindicator and
> never will, like Wine and Java. Are there any other besides those
> two?
>
>
Well, any closed but not replaceable application that can't or won't adapt,
as well as any open application that has yet to be fixed. The latter should
hopefully disappear over time (but how much time?), the former also goes
into the "never will "category for the purpose of this discussion at least.
Some software in use may not even have developers or even code any more.

I think the way forward is to fix all apps that are possible, via bug
reports and patches, and replace the rest with good alternatives over time.

I don't think the way forward is to sabotage a user experience because they
need (or even want to) use applications which can not yet be replaced, or at
least yet have to receive a patch.

I think that easy ways to conform and pointing out the benefit of belonging
should be enough "pressure" to adapt without actively breaking applications,
and probably just about as fast.

/ K
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> Plus, with this mockup, you need an inidicator icon/menu for each
> class of application that might put things in the notification area?

No. Just for the corner cases that cannot use libappindicator and
never will, like Wine and Java. Are there any other besides those
two?

All other classes of applications can simply use libappindicator.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Martin Owens]

On Tue, 2010-06-15 at 10:42 +0100, Luke Benstead wrote:
> We are talking about an
> impossible-to-overcome-by-application-indicator-design-limitation.

I presume system indicators went from objects to states so right
clicking was thrown out. So Networking to State of Network and Messages
to You Have Messages?

Just trying to get my head around the logic since right clicking nouns
is the correct DX isn't it.

Martin,


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 15 June 2010 19:10, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:

> On 15/06/10 10:42, Luke Benstead wrote:
> > We are talking about an
> > impossible-to-overcome-by-application-indicator-design-limitation.
>
> AppIndicators can't do this, you're right. But the system indicators
> like Network and Me menu's can, so a Wine one could too. We just need to
> think if that's a good enough UX.
>
>
Cool, I wasn't aware of that - well that gives us a little bit more
flexibility :)

Luke.
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Kristoffer Lundén]

2010/6/15 Jeremy Nickurak 

> Here's an idea: Just leave the notification icons in the panel. They
> should show up right next to the existing indicator icons. This could
> be done in the same indicator-applet or in a seperate
> notification-area applet, it doesn't really matter. What's important
> is that they should have the full, normal,  legacy behavior of
> notification icons, right down to tooltips and
> left/middle/right-clicks. Everything works just the way people would
> have expected 2-8 years ago.
>
> For ubuntu's purposes, you just make sure none of the major
> ubuntu-supported applications use the notification area API. If the
> user doesn't run anything with the notification area API, they'll
> never see an icon there, and it'll never take up any space, and it'll
> never feel inconsistent. If they do use applications that aren't
> ubuntu-supported, they'll work, just with a little less consistency.
>
>
This seems like the best idea. When using Wine to get non-standard
applications to work, you are consciously stepping outside the regular
experience and some inconsistency is expected.

I'm all for deprecating and forcing applications to modernize and fit in,
but only when there is an actual chance it may happen. Breaking the now
working experience of non-controllable but common use cases seems too much
like punishing the user because there is no substitute application in Ubuntu
and can only lead to a bad experience.

/ K
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 15/06/10 10:42, Luke Benstead wrote:
> We are talking about an
> impossible-to-overcome-by-application-indicator-design-limitation.

AppIndicators can't do this, you're right. But the system indicators
like Network and Me menu's can, so a Wine one could too. We just need to
think if that's a good enough UX.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 15/06/10 10:35, Luke Benstead wrote:
> I thought about that, but AFAIK you can't have right clicking (perhaps
> also double clicking) inside an indicator menu.

We could do a special-case for this.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jeremy Nickurak]

Plus, with this mockup, you need an inidicator icon/menu for each
class of application that might put things in the notification area?
That's gross, on top of the just-not-working problem.

Here's an idea: Just leave the notification icons in the panel. They
should show up right next to the existing indicator icons. This could
be done in the same indicator-applet or in a seperate
notification-area applet, it doesn't really matter. What's important
is that they should have the full, normal,  legacy behavior of
notification icons, right down to tooltips and
left/middle/right-clicks. Everything works just the way people would
have expected 2-8 years ago.

For ubuntu's purposes, you just make sure none of the major
ubuntu-supported applications use the notification area API. If the
user doesn't run anything with the notification area API, they'll
never see an icon there, and it'll never take up any space, and it'll
never feel inconsistent. If they do use applications that aren't
ubuntu-supported, they'll work, just with a little less consistency.

The good news about using the real notification tray is that Ubuntu
doesn't really have to put in any effort to get it... this is all
supported by upstream, in virtually every desktop environment, and
it'll always work with older applications, and families of
applications that aren't moving towards the libindicator approach.

So... what does ubuntu have to lose?

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 03:35, Luke Benstead  wrote:
>
>
> On 15 June 2010 10:32, Conscious User  wrote:
>>
>>
>> > A massive portion of Ubuntu users use Wine or Java apps to some
>> > degree. If we are trying to improve usability, how would relegating
>> > non-application-indicator-conforming apps to floating windows improve
>> > a user's experience compared to the current situation of having the
>> > (empty most of the time) old style notification area alongside the
>> > indicator-applet?
>> >
>> > I'm all for moving as many apps as possible to application indicators,
>> > but I can't see a better solution than leaving the notification area
>> > applet there. A Wine indicator applet would be nice, but Windows
>> > applications simply listen out for mouse click messages and do
>> > whatever they want when they receive them, so it's just not possible
>> > to do it in a way that would work consistently.
>> >
>> > That said, if there was a Windows version of the indicator applet and
>> > libraries, we might see some applications move to it - you never
>> > know :)
>>
>> How about a middle-ground compromise? Not using a full blown window,
>> but putting the Wine tray icons inside an indicator menu.
>>
>> Horrible mockup attached for illustration.
>>
>
> I thought about that, but AFAIK you can't have right clicking (perhaps also
> double clicking) inside an indicator menu.
>
> Luke.
>
>
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 15 June 2010 10:39, Conscious User  wrote:

>
>
> > How about a middle-ground compromise? Not using a full blown
> > window,
> > but putting the Wine tray icons inside an indicator menu.
> >
> > Horrible mockup attached for illustration.
> >
> >
> > I thought about that, but AFAIK you can't have right clicking (perhaps
> > also double clicking) inside an indicator menu.
>
>
> Are we talking about an impossible-to-overcome-by-design-gtk-limitation
> or a workable-around-jumping-through-some-hoops limitation?
>
>
We are talking about an
impossible-to-overcome-by-application-indicator-design-limitation.

Luke.
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> How about a middle-ground compromise? Not using a full blown
> window,
> but putting the Wine tray icons inside an indicator menu.
> 
> Horrible mockup attached for illustration.
> 
> 
> I thought about that, but AFAIK you can't have right clicking (perhaps
> also double clicking) inside an indicator menu.


Are we talking about an impossible-to-overcome-by-design-gtk-limitation
or a workable-around-jumping-through-some-hoops limitation?




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 15 June 2010 10:32, Conscious User  wrote:

>
>
> > A massive portion of Ubuntu users use Wine or Java apps to some
> > degree. If we are trying to improve usability, how would relegating
> > non-application-indicator-conforming apps to floating windows improve
> > a user's experience compared to the current situation of having the
> > (empty most of the time) old style notification area alongside the
> > indicator-applet?
> >
> > I'm all for moving as many apps as possible to application indicators,
> > but I can't see a better solution than leaving the notification area
> > applet there. A Wine indicator applet would be nice, but Windows
> > applications simply listen out for mouse click messages and do
> > whatever they want when they receive them, so it's just not possible
> > to do it in a way that would work consistently.
> >
> > That said, if there was a Windows version of the indicator applet and
> > libraries, we might see some applications move to it - you never
> > know :)
>
> How about a middle-ground compromise? Not using a full blown window,
> but putting the Wine tray icons inside an indicator menu.
>
> Horrible mockup attached for illustration.
>
>
I thought about that, but AFAIK you can't have right clicking (perhaps also
double clicking) inside an indicator menu.

Luke.
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> A massive portion of Ubuntu users use Wine or Java apps to some
> degree. If we are trying to improve usability, how would relegating
> non-application-indicator-conforming apps to floating windows improve
> a user's experience compared to the current situation of having the
> (empty most of the time) old style notification area alongside the
> indicator-applet?
> 
> I'm all for moving as many apps as possible to application indicators,
> but I can't see a better solution than leaving the notification area
> applet there. A Wine indicator applet would be nice, but Windows
> applications simply listen out for mouse click messages and do
> whatever they want when they receive them, so it's just not possible
> to do it in a way that would work consistently.
> 
> That said, if there was a Windows version of the indicator applet and
> libraries, we might see some applications move to it - you never
> know :)

How about a middle-ground compromise? Not using a full blown window,
but putting the Wine tray icons inside an indicator menu.

Horrible mockup attached for illustration.


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 14 June 2010 08:31, Matthew Paul Thomas  wrote:

> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Scott Ritchie wrote on 23/04/10 06:48:
> >
> > I like where you're going, but what do we do about interoperability?
> >
> > There's a hint in your post that we'll simply leave apps broken, stick
> > up our middle fingers, and tempt developers with our millions of users.
> > That may work for open source projects in our repository, but we need
> > to accept the reality that there will be programs that don't conform.
> >
> > The most obvious example is any software originally written for Windows
> > and running in Wine.  Wine uses XEmbed to create its own systray, and
> > the most reasonable place to put Wine's system tray is the notification
> > area.
> >...
>
> You mentioned at UDS that before Wine began inserting notification area
> items into the Gnome notification area, it put them in a separate
> window. I suggest that it return to doing that. Java applications will
> be in the same situation.
>
>
Hi Matthew,

A massive portion of Ubuntu users use Wine or Java apps to some degree. If
we are trying to improve usability, how would relegating
non-application-indicator-conforming apps to floating windows improve a
user's experience compared to the current situation of having the (empty
most of the time) old style notification area alongside the
indicator-applet?

I'm all for moving as many apps as possible to application indicators, but I
can't see a better solution than leaving the notification area applet there.
A Wine indicator applet would be nice, but Windows applications simply
listen out for mouse click messages and do whatever they want when they
receive them, so it's just not possible to do it in a way that would work
consistently.

That said, if there was a Windows version of the indicator applet and
libraries, we might see some applications move to it - you never know :)

Luke.
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Scott Ritchie]

On 06/14/2010 12:31 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Scott Ritchie wrote on 23/04/10 06:48:
> 
>> I like where you're going, but what do we do about interoperability?
> 
>> There's a hint in your post that we'll simply leave apps broken, stick
>> up our middle fingers, and tempt developers with our millions of users.
>> That may work for open source projects in our repository, but we need
>> to accept the reality that there will be programs that don't conform.
> 
>> The most obvious example is any software originally written for Windows
>> and running in Wine.  Wine uses XEmbed to create its own systray, and
>> the most reasonable place to put Wine's system tray is the notification
>> area.
>> ...
> 
> You mentioned at UDS that before Wine began inserting notification area
> items into the Gnome notification area, it put them in a separate
> window. I suggest that it return to doing that. Java applications will
> be in the same situation.
> 

I'm worried that if we still have empty space in the top panel and then
present a window not in the top panel users will immediately wonder why
the window isn't just embedded in the panel like it used to be (and is
on Windows.)

A window also has the normal inconveniences: to interact with it it must
first be focused on.  It will also be very small (holding only a single
icon of content in most cases, too small for window controls).

A window also means we need to worry about what to title it in the
bottom bar - for a user who doesn't even know they're running Wine,
spawning a "Wine System Tray" in the background and on the bottom is
likely to be missed.  Populating an item in the bottom bar also means
we'll have less space available for other apps - In fact I'm reasonably
certain we waste less space in the top panel than the bottom panel by
just using the system tray icons.

Basically, there's a reason Wine stopped using the systray window.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Dylan McCall wrote on 26/04/10 16:28:
>...
> Lots of things can be done with PolicyKit and Gksudo to encourage more
> secure operation, and with some work maybe we can help raise the
> user's awareness when he enters a password. Something quick that
> occurs to me is that the password dialog could show a personal message
> or a picture that only PolicyKit or gksudo has access to.
>...

We ended up approving this idea at UDS.


- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Scott Ritchie wrote on 23/04/10 06:48:
> 
> I like where you're going, but what do we do about interoperability?
> 
> There's a hint in your post that we'll simply leave apps broken, stick
> up our middle fingers, and tempt developers with our millions of users.
> That may work for open source projects in our repository, but we need
> to accept the reality that there will be programs that don't conform.
> 
> The most obvious example is any software originally written for Windows
> and running in Wine.  Wine uses XEmbed to create its own systray, and
> the most reasonable place to put Wine's system tray is the notification
> area.
>...

You mentioned at UDS that before Wine began inserting notification area
items into the Gnome notification area, it put them in a separate
window. I suggest that it return to doing that. Java applications will
be in the same situation.

- -- 
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http://mpt.net.nz/
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Martin Owens wrote on 21/04/10 21:57:
>...
> So long as it doesn't kill off the character pallet that I use for
> printing ° and € :-) I'll be fine.
>...

I've specified that you should be able to access the Character Map from
the keyboard menu . If you want
more direct access to particular characters, you'd need to (find someone
to) implement a custom menu for that.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 22:12, Ted Gould  wrote:
> Whether or not it's important to UI design is independent to whether it
> is related to removing the notification area.  For instance, the update
> manager icon could as easily be an app indicator or notification area
> icon.
>
> So, I think what David is asking for here is another thread more than a
> removal of the discussion overall.
>
>                --Ted

yah, things drift away and we all sail along with them sometimes, i
noticed this since i recently joined this list.
while charming on the one hand, it can get a little confusing and
perhaps even stall a creative process by adding too much dissipatory
energy..

i think we all know the rules, if you want to take it OT, branch out.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 22:12, Ted Gould  wrote:
> Whether or not it's important to UI design is independent to whether it
> is related to removing the notification area.  For instance, the update
> manager icon could as easily be an app indicator or notification area
> icon.
>
> So, I think what David is asking for here is another thread more than a
> removal of the discussion overall.
>
>                --Ted

yah, things drift away and we all sail along with them sometimes, i
noticed this since i recently joined this list.
while charming on the one hand, it can get a little confusing and
perhaps even stall a creative process by adding too much dissipatory
energy..

i think we all know the rules, if you want to take it OT, branch out.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Ted Gould]

On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 13:57 -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> "David Siegel"  wrote:
> >What does this have to do with the notification area changes? Please
> >continue this conversation elsewhere if you must. Let's all do our
> >part to keep Ayatana discussions on track.
>
> I guess it depends on if you believe security is irrelevant to U/I 
> design or not. Since at least some related changes have potential security 
> implications,  I think the question of if it appropriate to ignore those 
> implications is right on topic.

Whether or not it's important to UI design is independent to whether it
is related to removing the notification area.  For instance, the update
manager icon could as easily be an app indicator or notification area
icon.

So, I think what David is asking for here is another thread more than a
removal of the discussion overall.

--Ted



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Scott Kitterman]

"David Siegel"  wrote:

>What does this have to do with the notification area changes? Please
>continue this conversation elsewhere if you must. Let's all do our
>part to keep Ayatana discussions on track.
>
I guess it depends on if you believe security is irrelevant to U/I design or 
not. Since at least some related changes have potential security implications,  
I think the question of if it appropriate to ignore those implications is right 
on topic.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[David Siegel]

What does this have to do with the notification area changes? Please
continue this conversation elsewhere if you must. Let's all do our
part to keep Ayatana discussions on track.

David

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Scott Kitterman]

"Frederik Nnaji"  wrote:

>security is nothing for a visual internet designer to be concerned about.
>we have a security team taking care of that, did anybody as *them*?

This is completely wrong (even with your amendments).  Security considerations 
must be embedded in all aspects of design. Security is not something that can 
just be bolted on afterwards. 

Scott K
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 17:28, Dylan McCall  wrote:
> Something quick that occurs to me is that the password
> dialog could show a personal message
> or a picture that only PolicyKit or gksudo has access to.

THANK YOU for putting a dot to this hairy topic!
i hope the security team is aware of leapholes opening in the UI, and
will suggest some stuff in detail.

> Really, what this is about is "don't tell your password to strange
> programs;" we need to help the user identify strange programs and
> understand the risk.

yes very much so. Linux is strong, my main argument to those
interested: no viruses, no perfomance loss through firewalls and
scanners.

we ought to keep it that way!

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Dylan McCall]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:25 AM, Frederik Nnaji
 wrote:
> security is nothing for a visual internet designer to be concerned about.

I'm mostly in agreement with you there, Frederik. I do think UI design
has a role to play in security (in particular, we can't make the user
tired of the concept), but there is no way we can guarantee the
security of a tool by visuals alone.

Anything can create a full-screen screen fade. (Although,
interestingly, Javascript on a web page seems to do a much smoother
fade than gksudo). The indicator API is built so anything can create
an indicator. I think it would be awesome if web apps could create
indicators, and Chrome does desktop notifications now, so that's
probably not too far away.
Saying "anything on the panel is what it claims" is to create a very,
very dangerous environment.

Lots of things can be done with PolicyKit and Gksudo to encourage more
secure operation, and with some work maybe we can help raise the
user's awareness when he enters a password. Something quick that
occurs to me is that the password dialog could show a personal message
or a picture that only PolicyKit or gksudo has access to.

Really, what this is about is "don't tell your password to strange
programs;" we need to help the user identify strange programs and
understand the risk. It's already a big puzzle, so let's not add more
pieces unless it is really, really necessary.



Thanks :)

Dylan

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 16:25, Frederik Nnaji  wrote:
> security is nothing for a visual internet designer to be concerned about.
oh gods, forgive me:

..nothing for a visual UI designer..

sorry!

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 16:25, Frederik Nnaji  wrote:
> security is nothing for a visual internet designer to be concerned about.
oh gods forgive me!
//visual designer//

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

security is nothing for a visual internet designer to be concerned about.
we have a security team taking care of that, did anybody as *them*?
i see the sustainable security solution in the fashion of PGP
protection for example.

how do others implement update notification?
didn't OSX show updates (undynamically) in the session menu?
We could do this dynamically in "incator applet session".
why not put it in there?
if an automatic "apt-get update --critical-only" (sry guys) returns
stuff, an item would be displaced in the system menu, and the power
button would turn into notification color, perhaps blue this time,
since it's not a restart we are alerting about.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Chow Loong Jin]

On Monday 26,April,2010 01:39 AM, Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 13:55 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
>> That is the reason while the pop-up/under/what ever is a BAD idea. And
>> the reason is that it is asynchronous, so the user is getting taught
>> to respond to (possibly fake) windows request their password. This is
>> a path for disaster if we ever get remotely close to solving Bug n. 1.
> 
> Option #1: Display an icon in the notification area that nobody clicks,
> as a result security updates never get installed and system is
> compromised from the lack of important security updates.
> 
> Option #2: Pop-up the update dialog demanding attention, most users
> click to install the important updates and system is secure as system
> security updates are always applied.
> 
> Side effect of Option #2: Some users may get fooled into typing their
> password into a fake update-manager dialog inside a web page. So...what
> does a web page do with the user's password once it's obtained? Not
> much, as there shouldn't be much to do with it anyway if there is no
> malware installed on the computer. A desktop computer should _not_ be
> accessible from the Internet with a user's password.
> 
>>From a security point of vue, option #2 is a _lot_ safer.
> 
>> And, answering to Mark, yes it is much more difficult to fake an icon
>> in the system panel because the system panel. The reason is that we
>> are assuming that the system haven't been compromised yet, so there
>> isn't any malware running on the system. What Jim, and I, and others,
>> were talking about was websites spoofing the update-manager using the
>> browser and technologies like flash. In this case it is not trivial to
>> present a icon in the panel as there are only two possibilities for
>> it:
> 
> If you don't have malware installed on your computer, the damage caused
> by a random website obtaining the user's login credentials is low.

Not really. Many users run ssh on their systems. With a few tracking cookies in
place to determine what username you usually use, I'm sure that you could ssh
into a system that you have the IP of. And with the username and password, you
could use sudo to gain root on any of those systems.

Let us also not forget that many regular users don't keep their password very
closely guarded, and use the same (weak) password for many websites. Obtaining a
username and password would also mean potential access to all these other 
websites.

Saying that not much can be done even if usernames and passwords were given away
online does not make it any less of a security concern.

> 
> If you _do_ have malware installed on your computer, it can do anything,
> including displaying in the notification area, or simply waiting until
> the next time your user _needs_ to use his password.

The point was that it could be spoofed without malware being installed.

> 
>> 1) The panel is visible and outside the browsers' windows borders. In
>> this case the pop-up coming from the internet would need to ask the
>> browser to open a new window and position that window on the right
>> place to look like the update icon. Note that in this case the browser
>> would need a new window and, if  I remember correctly, new windows are
>> always created with the windows decorations around it. Then the fake
>> icon (with window borders around it) would be easily recognizable
> 
> The same goes with pop up windows, in order for it to appear in the
> window switcher.

Windows that are positioned in the same place as the panel will end up below the
panel, not above.

> 
>> I do believe that the system should only notify the user about
>> updates. If the updates are security updates the system could be a
>> pain (showing a notification bubble every 5 minutes if the user did
>> not apply the security updates for some days). But the user should
>> always be the one to call the update-manager window and hence trust it
>> to give his password.
>>
>> Then we could go back to common sense: if you haven't started a
>> workflow where you know that you password will be required don't give
>> your password!
> 
> This concept is completely foreign to regular users and I doubt it could
> be something that could be relied upon. "Did you _do_ something for the
> password prompt to be displayed?" is not a question most users would be
> able to answer.

And most regular users haven't the slightest inkling about secure practices,
which is what spawned this discussion in the first place.

> 
> The whole "pop-ups aren't secure" argument sounds like an attempt to use
> security as justification to revert back to the previous behaviour. The
> problem is the previous behaviour isn't secure.

In any case it is more secure than the current behaviour. And much less
obstrusive/disruptive to workflow too.

There was mention of using colour in the messaging indicator to show that there
are messages, as these stand out from monochrome icons. There is also colour
used for the

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Paulo J. S. Silva]

> I think installing security updates automatically may be the only way to
> get them installed for people who are afraid of the pop-ups.
>

I agree.

>>
>> I do believe that the best balance would be to prompt the user in
>> specific moments (log-out, before suspend/lock) with a dialog that has
>> as default option to apply the updates. The tricky part here is that
>> many people are just leaving their computer on all the time and they
>> are not there when the computer sleeps or lock screen to confirm the
>> update.
>>
>> Actually I got a proposal: present the update dialog at
>> log-out/automatic suspend/lock-screen. The user can ignore (for
>> example if he/she is not there). If the user ignores it for more than
>> a certain amount of time (for example a week) present a notification
>> at login/awake/unlock that the system will apply the security update
>> at next log-out/etc (or that the user can apply it right away if
>> he/she wants).
>>
>
> I think this is sure-fire way to make sure the updates _never_ get
> installed. On laptops, when people want to turn off or suspend, they
> want it to do so immediately, not after 10 minutes of security updates.
> I'm pretty sure the success rate of this type of prompt would be even
> lower than the blinking notification area.
>

That is why I said that at least at first that should be no automatic
updates, but only after some time. I would also prompt the user that
the updates are present at login/resume. And Considering what you just
said it may be interesting to consider automatic updates at login (and
in the background so that the user can do what he wanted when he/she
turned on the computer).

> I completely agree that a lot of people use the same password for many
> things. Preventing web applications from spoofing the security update
> dialog box still won't prevent web applications from spoofing any other
> authentication dialog, whether it be facebook, or their on-line banking
> site. Phishing is a technique that works, and it's when users take a
> specific action (clicking a link). Again, I honestly don't think users
> are able to tell the difference in security between something they've
> asked for (clicking on a tray icon, or clicking a phishing link in an
> email), and something that popped up automatically.
>

But in that case the problem lies on the application/web site that is
being spoofed. If
facebook is using asynchronous login it is their problem. But Ubuntu
is using asynchronous passwords prompts, so this is Ubuntu's community
problem.

>> If you really think that regular users can not understand the simple
>> security procedures,
>>  we are hopeless. In this case, some kind of automatic update is the only 
>> way.
>
> Maybe it would make sense to have a "Install updates automatically in
> the future" check box in the updates dialog to make it easier to enable
> this?
>

That sounds good to me.

>> No, it is not. But you will have to take my word for that as you can
>> not get into my mind :-)
>> I don't care anymore, I just switch to the old behavior (and if it
>> becomes unavailable I'll just hack a simple script to email me when
>> there are updates available
>> and I'll turn off update-manager forever).
>
> Ah, so do _you_ switch to the old behavior because you don't like the
> the pop-up, or because you can't tell the difference between a spoofed
> update manager window in a web page and the real update manager?

At first, I turned it off because I thought it was annoying. Now, I
try to convince my friends that use Linux (and some use it due to me)
to turn it off because it is dangerous. I would never turn it on again
in my computers because I know I don't want to get used to give my
password to pop-up/under windows that can be spoofed.

>>
>> But for me the best selling point for Linux is that it is much more
>> secure than windows. I usually use the mantra "Imagine not having to
>> be paranoid about virus all the time"? It really sounds a bad idea to
>> have a easy and potential security risk just waiting to happen. I do
>> think that this can hurt Linux profile bad.
>
> Having a few people get fooled by a fake dialog box will probably hurt
> Linux a lot less than having Linux users be infected with malware
> because no one is installing security updates...

Even better is to find out a away to make users do their updates
without making them get used to behaviors that are also security
risks. Just think a little, you are already admitting that some people
can get fooled. So you are accepting that getting the user used to
give up his password for asynchronous windows is risky. This sounds
bad to me.

Just remember that any security conscious business always tell its
client not to give their passwords to asynchronous requests. See the
bank example or web stores. They never send you an email or call you
asking for your password. They advertise that to their customers and
say explicitly that you should delete any message that ask for you

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 19:28 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
> > Option #1: Display an icon in the notification area that nobody clicks,
> > as a result security updates never get installed and system is
> > compromised from the lack of important security updates.
> >
> > Option #2: Pop-up the update dialog demanding attention, most users
> > click to install the important updates and system is secure as system
> > security updates are always applied.
> >
> 
> I don't see why there are only two options. There are more. For
> example, I am favorable to prompt the user when logging out or some
> other moment that we can predict that the user is "closing the day"
> for updates. Actually, I am one of the few that would favor applying
> the
> security updates by default (but leaving an easy way to turn it off).
> I don't believe we can find
> a way to make sure the user will apply the updates if he/she has to
> don anything. I know
> that my mother, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and other family members
> never apply
> the updates (they use windows). They are simply afraid of the window
> that pops-up.
> Usually when I go to their place I usually sit on the computer and
> apply the updates myself.
> However I know that this is a dangerous move as the user may have a
> non-functional computer after an update failure and since it was
> automatic he/she may not even know that an update took place.

I think installing security updates automatically may be the only way to
get them installed for people who are afraid of the pop-ups.

> 
> I do believe that the best balance would be to prompt the user in
> specific moments (log-out, before suspend/lock) with a dialog that has
> as default option to apply the updates. The tricky part here is that
> many people are just leaving their computer on all the time and they
> are not there when the computer sleeps or lock screen to confirm the
> update.
> 
> Actually I got a proposal: present the update dialog at
> log-out/automatic suspend/lock-screen. The user can ignore (for
> example if he/she is not there). If the user ignores it for more than
> a certain amount of time (for example a week) present a notification
> at login/awake/unlock that the system will apply the security update
> at next log-out/etc (or that the user can apply it right away if
> he/she wants).
> 

I think this is sure-fire way to make sure the updates _never_ get
installed. On laptops, when people want to turn off or suspend, they
want it to do so immediately, not after 10 minutes of security updates.
I'm pretty sure the success rate of this type of prompt would be even
lower than the blinking notification area.

> > Side effect of Option #2: Some users may get fooled into typing their
> > password into a fake update-manager dialog inside a web page. So...what
> > does a web page do with the user's password once it's obtained? Not
> > much, as there shouldn't be much to do with it anyway if there is no
> > malware installed on the computer. A desktop computer should _not_ be
> > accessible from the Internet with a user's password.
> >
> 
> You got a point here. All my systems have sshd enabled.
> 
> > >From a security point of vue, option #2 is a _lot_ safer.
> 
> As you know, many people use the same password for many things.

I completely agree that a lot of people use the same password for many
things. Preventing web applications from spoofing the security update
dialog box still won't prevent web applications from spoofing any other
authentication dialog, whether it be facebook, or their on-line banking
site. Phishing is a technique that works, and it's when users take a
specific action (clicking a link). Again, I honestly don't think users
are able to tell the difference in security between something they've
asked for (clicking on a tray icon, or clicking a phishing link in an
email), and something that popped up automatically.

> 
> >
> > This concept is completely foreign to regular users and I doubt it could
> > be something that could be relied upon. "Did you _do_ something for the
> > password prompt to be displayed?" is not a question most users would be
> > able to answer.
> >
> 
> If you really think that regular users can not understand the simple
> security procedures,
>  we are hopeless. In this case, some kind of automatic update is the only way.

Maybe it would make sense to have a "Install updates automatically in
the future" check box in the updates dialog to make it easier to enable
this?


> 
> > The whole "pop-ups aren't secure" argument sounds like an attempt to use
> > security as justification to revert back to the previous behaviour. The
> > problem is the previous behaviour isn't secure.
> >
> 
> No, it is not. But you will have to take my word for that as you can
> not get into my mind :-)
> I don't care anymore, I just switch to the old behavior (and if it
> becomes unavailable I'll just hack a simple script to email me when
> there are updates available
> and I'll turn o

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Paulo J. S. Silva]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Marc Deslauriers
 wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 13:55 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
>> That is the reason while the pop-up/under/what ever is a BAD idea. And
>> the reason is that it is asynchronous, so the user is getting taught
>> to respond to (possibly fake) windows request their password. This is
>> a path for disaster if we ever get remotely close to solving Bug n. 1.
>
> Option #1: Display an icon in the notification area that nobody clicks,
> as a result security updates never get installed and system is
> compromised from the lack of important security updates.
>
> Option #2: Pop-up the update dialog demanding attention, most users
> click to install the important updates and system is secure as system
> security updates are always applied.
>

I don't see why there are only two options. There are more. For
example, I am favorable to prompt the user when logging out or some
other moment that we can predict that the user is "closing the day"
for updates. Actually, I am one of the few that would favor applying
the
security updates by default (but leaving an easy way to turn it off).
I don't believe we can find
a way to make sure the user will apply the updates if he/she has to
don anything. I know
that my mother, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and other family members
never apply
the updates (they use windows). They are simply afraid of the window
that pops-up.
Usually when I go to their place I usually sit on the computer and
apply the updates myself.
However I know that this is a dangerous move as the user may have a
non-functional computer after an update failure and since it was
automatic he/she may not even know that an update took place.

I do believe that the best balance would be to prompt the user in
specific moments (log-out, before suspend/lock) with a dialog that has
as default option to apply the updates. The tricky part here is that
many people are just leaving their computer on all the time and they
are not there when the computer sleeps or lock screen to confirm the
update.

Actually I got a proposal: present the update dialog at
log-out/automatic suspend/lock-screen. The user can ignore (for
example if he/she is not there). If the user ignores it for more than
a certain amount of time (for example a week) present a notification
at login/awake/unlock that the system will apply the security update
at next log-out/etc (or that the user can apply it right away if
he/she wants).

> Side effect of Option #2: Some users may get fooled into typing their
> password into a fake update-manager dialog inside a web page. So...what
> does a web page do with the user's password once it's obtained? Not
> much, as there shouldn't be much to do with it anyway if there is no
> malware installed on the computer. A desktop computer should _not_ be
> accessible from the Internet with a user's password.
>

You got a point here. All my systems have sshd enabled.

> >From a security point of vue, option #2 is a _lot_ safer.

As you know, many people use the same password for many things.

...

> The same goes with pop up windows, in order for it to appear in the
> window switcher.

Could you please at least read the argument? I am not talking about
pop-up's (that have
window decorations), I am talking about those windows that don't have
decorations
and that appear inside webpages (I think they are made with flash). Or
do you mean
that the *regular* user will take a look at the window switcher and
say "oh, the
window that has just popped-up is not in the windows switcher, it
should be a fake
window"? If we assume that the regular user is not concerned about security to
apply updates, why should we assume that they would care to look at the windows
switcher.

>
> This concept is completely foreign to regular users and I doubt it could
> be something that could be relied upon. "Did you _do_ something for the
> password prompt to be displayed?" is not a question most users would be
> able to answer.
>

If you really think that regular users can not understand the simple
security procedures,
 we are hopeless. In this case, some kind of automatic update is the only way.


> The whole "pop-ups aren't secure" argument sounds like an attempt to use
> security as justification to revert back to the previous behaviour. The
> problem is the previous behaviour isn't secure.
>

No, it is not. But you will have to take my word for that as you can
not get into my mind :-)
I don't care anymore, I just switch to the old behavior (and if it
becomes unavailable I'll just hack a simple script to email me when
there are updates available
and I'll turn off update-manager forever).

But for me the best selling point for Linux is that it is much more
secure than windows. I usually use the mantra "Imagine not having to
be paranoid about virus all the time"? It really sounds a bad idea to
have a easy and potential security risk just waiting to happen. I do
think that this can hurt Linux profile bad.

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Vishnoo]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 13:55 -0400, Jim Rorie wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 10:55 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> 
> > 
> > > 2) I have to dig through the menu to trigger updates(Hmm, is that
> > > preferences or administration?  I can never remember).  Annoying for a
> > > regular task.
> > >   
> > 
> > Again. Updates are not a regular task for regular users.
> 
> But they are a part of life for some of us.  And we had a process that
> worked and wasn't particularly annoying.  

I have to admit ahead, I'm an update junkie as well ;)
I initially too threw a fit for the icon being removed as well.

But, for whom and for when is the system *ultimately* designed for? 
The end stable release doesnt have as frequent updates or as many
updates as the alpha/beta/RC releases. 
Therefore it is not really a regular task. And SRUs are being minimized
as much as possible, unless essential.
The rest of us can hack our way around and revert the behavior.

Some discontent is from members who mention that they had introduced and
familiarized the update icon to their family and now their family
members dont do the update.
So... we just need to reintroduce the new behavior. ;)

-- 
Cheers,
Vish


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 25 April 2010 18:39, Marc Deslauriers  wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 13:55 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
>> That is the reason while the pop-up/under/what ever is a BAD idea. And
>> the reason is that it is asynchronous, so the user is getting taught
>> to respond to (possibly fake) windows request their password. This is
>> a path for disaster if we ever get remotely close to solving Bug n. 1.
>
> Option #1: Display an icon in the notification area that nobody clicks,
> as a result security updates never get installed and system is
> compromised from the lack of important security updates.
>
> Option #2: Pop-up the update dialog demanding attention, most users
> click to install the important updates and system is secure as system
> security updates are always applied.
>

I really don't see why this is an either/or thing. Display an
indicator showing whether updates are available and give a menu to
allow updates to be installed or the package lists to be refreshed. It
can even glow a nice red if security updates are available, or amber
if they are just normal updates. Then if a user doesn't install them
for a week or whatever THEN give them a more obvious prodding
(although I firmly believe the current solution of popping under a
window is not a good idea for the reasons already mentioned).

Luke.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jim Rorie]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 13:39 -0400, Marc Deslauriers wrote:

> So...what does a web page do with the user's password once it's obtained? Not
> much,


Go here and read the saga:
http://thecoffeedesk.com/news/index.php/2009/08/22/4chan-hacked-facebook-pictures/

They used the password from one site to hack into others.

One event like this on Canonical's record would be in the Microsoft press 
release for years to come.



-- 
Jim  Rorie, PhD
nLumen - the Business Doctor

jfro...@nlumen.com
IM: jfrorie (XMPP/GoogleTalk)





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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jim Rorie]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 10:55 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> 
> > 2) I have to dig through the menu to trigger updates(Hmm, is that
> > preferences or administration?  I can never remember).  Annoying for a
> > regular task.
> >   
> 
> Again. Updates are not a regular task for regular users.

But they are a part of life for some of us.  And we had a process that
worked and wasn't particularly annoying.  I'm not saying that we should
go back to the old way.  But don't you think going forward you should
have something in place that is at least as convenient for those of us
that put our blood, sweat and tears into this distro? 

I like the updates on reboot. ALOT. I'm not married to the notification
area.  Kill it dead if you have a good solution in the workspaces thread
that provides a panel shortcut concept.  That's my only concern.

But please think long and hard about throwing a pop-down on desktop for
any reason. I know it's just for security updates, but they can be
handled at reboot.  If they decline for 20th time, scold them with a
dialog.  But make it synchronous based on the users intent to reboot.

If they never intend to reboot(kiosk), then maybe this is question best
asked during installation and a strongly worded suggestion presented for
continuous updates.  

It's less for you to keep up with.  It provides a consistent path for
the user. And it resolves a security hole, I assure you.


> excitement. It makes you important to us, which is why I'm taking the
> time to answer this for the umpteenth time, 

I'm not sure why I am so blessed. :)

> Some security updates are not active until you reboot. Period. If
> there is a security problem in your kernel, you need a new kernel, and
> you need to boot it. We're done a lot of work to minimise the number
> of cases where that's important, but I'm not aware of any way to
> eliminate the occasional requirement of a reboot.

I understand that and it's a strong argument for putting ALL updates and
notifications at the point of reboot for consistency.  

> 
> > > That's what MPT is arguing for. Your response is "the crux of the
> > > problem is the asynchronous window". But you're missing the point that
> > > the underlying condition is both serious and asynchronous.
> > > 
> > My understanding of the problem is both thorough and profound.
> > 
> >   
> 
> But your arguments are not entirely persuasive :-)

Ditto, my kind sir. :)
  
> 
> And you think malware couldn't put up a systray icon tricking you into
> thinking you have updates? You think you would be able to tell the
> difference? The panel icon is just as fakeable as the popup.

I'm not going to respond directly to this as I think it was adequately
covered by both chow, Conscious user, Paulo and others.  I am strongly
in their camp.

We are both busy people so I don't intend to belabor the point.  We were
asked by MPT to present our cases against it and I did.  I see a
potential solution in your specifications, but I also see a primary
solution that has some serious drawbacks, which I have pointed out.

I truly hope some thought will be put into the points I've made.





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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 13:55 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
> That is the reason while the pop-up/under/what ever is a BAD idea. And
> the reason is that it is asynchronous, so the user is getting taught
> to respond to (possibly fake) windows request their password. This is
> a path for disaster if we ever get remotely close to solving Bug n. 1.

Option #1: Display an icon in the notification area that nobody clicks,
as a result security updates never get installed and system is
compromised from the lack of important security updates.

Option #2: Pop-up the update dialog demanding attention, most users
click to install the important updates and system is secure as system
security updates are always applied.

Side effect of Option #2: Some users may get fooled into typing their
password into a fake update-manager dialog inside a web page. So...what
does a web page do with the user's password once it's obtained? Not
much, as there shouldn't be much to do with it anyway if there is no
malware installed on the computer. A desktop computer should _not_ be
accessible from the Internet with a user's password.

>From a security point of vue, option #2 is a _lot_ safer.

> And, answering to Mark, yes it is much more difficult to fake an icon
> in the system panel because the system panel. The reason is that we
> are assuming that the system haven't been compromised yet, so there
> isn't any malware running on the system. What Jim, and I, and others,
> were talking about was websites spoofing the update-manager using the
> browser and technologies like flash. In this case it is not trivial to
> present a icon in the panel as there are only two possibilities for
> it:

If you don't have malware installed on your computer, the damage caused
by a random website obtaining the user's login credentials is low.

If you _do_ have malware installed on your computer, it can do anything,
including displaying in the notification area, or simply waiting until
the next time your user _needs_ to use his password.

> 1) The panel is visible and outside the browsers' windows borders. In
> this case the pop-up coming from the internet would need to ask the
> browser to open a new window and position that window on the right
> place to look like the update icon. Note that in this case the browser
> would need a new window and, if  I remember correctly, new windows are
> always created with the windows decorations around it. Then the fake
> icon (with window borders around it) would be easily recognizable.

The same goes with pop up windows, in order for it to appear in the
window switcher.

> I do believe that the system should only notify the user about
> updates. If the updates are security updates the system could be a
> pain (showing a notification bubble every 5 minutes if the user did
> not apply the security updates for some days). But the user should
> always be the one to call the update-manager window and hence trust it
> to give his password.
> 
> Then we could go back to common sense: if you haven't started a
> workflow where you know that you password will be required don't give
> your password!

This concept is completely foreign to regular users and I doubt it could
be something that could be relied upon. "Did you _do_ something for the
password prompt to be displayed?" is not a question most users would be
able to answer.

The whole "pop-ups aren't secure" argument sounds like an attempt to use
security as justification to revert back to the previous behaviour. The
problem is the previous behaviour isn't secure.

Marc.




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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Paulo J. S. Silva]

That is the reason while the pop-up/under/what ever is a BAD idea. And
the reason is that it is asynchronous, so the user is getting taught
to respond to (possibly fake) windows request their password. This is
a path for disaster if we ever get remotely close to solving Bug n. 1.

And, answering to Mark, yes it is much more difficult to fake an icon
in the system panel because the system panel. The reason is that we
are assuming that the system haven't been compromised yet, so there
isn't any malware running on the system. What Jim, and I, and others,
were talking about was websites spoofing the update-manager using the
browser and technologies like flash. In this case it is not trivial to
present a icon in the panel as there are only two possibilities for
it:

1) The panel is visible and outside the browsers' windows borders. In
this case the pop-up coming from the internet would need to ask the
browser to open a new window and position that window on the right
place to look like the update icon. Note that in this case the browser
would need a new window and, if  I remember correctly, new windows are
always created with the windows decorations around it. Then the fake
icon (with window borders around it) would be easily recognizable.

2) The panel is hidden behind the browser window (which must be in
full screen mode). In this case the notification icon can not appear
in the right place because the browser toolbar is on top (and there is
no panel there).

I do believe that the system should only notify the user about
updates. If the updates are security updates the system could be a
pain (showing a notification bubble every 5 minutes if the user did
not apply the security updates for some days). But the user should
always be the one to call the update-manager window and hence trust it
to give his password.

Then we could go back to common sense: if you haven't started a
workflow where you know that you password will be required don't give
your password!

Paulo
On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 7:46 AM, Conscious User  wrote:
>
>> Disagree. Because update-manager does not require gksudo, there is no
>> screen dimming or anything else that indicates in an obvious manner
>> that it is an actual update window and not a popup coming from the
>> browser.
>>
>> (I'm not talking about popup in the browser window sense, I'm talking
>> about popups in the z-index sense, they can work because it is
>> very common for the user to use the browser fullscreen)
>>
>> Thinking better, *even* with screen dimming the user can be tricked:
>> all it needs is from him to have a dark theme (so the non-dimming
>> of the browser toolbar and the panel would be less noticeable)
>
> To illustrate my point, go to this site:
>
> http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/
>
> and click on an image.
>
> This pretty much convinces me that faking the update window is trivial.
>
>
>
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-- 
Paulo José da Silva e Silva
Professor Associado, Dep. de Ciência da Computação
(Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept.)
Universidade de São Paulo - Brazil

e-mail: pjssi...@ime.usp.br Web: http://www.ime.usp.br/~pjssilva

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

Hi Matthew, Mark,
  First of all, I'd like to say thank you for posting this as a
discussion to the list - whether I like or dislike what you want to
do it's best it's spoken about!

  I think I agree with the notification area being a bad thing,
however I'm not sure that a set of unmovable indicators located
at the top corner of the desktop is logically any different - you're
just using a different mechanism to coral all the icons together.
However what you propose to do with those icons is a bit different - 
but fundamentally I think that could be done on top of the existing
notification area.

  Fundamentally I dislike the Opinionated Placement of the set of icons;
I like the fact I can move my placement icon set to where ever is my
preferred place on my panel.

  However, I do like the consistent ordering of the set of icons within
the set of indicators/notifications - I dislike how the order of the
icons in notification area depends on the startup order of the
applications.

  (Note here I'm expressing that I like to have control of things
but I like to be able to setup multiple machines, multiple boots
of machines to look the same)

  I think there are really a few different types of entry in the
notification area and I think it's pretty important to distinguish
between them when deciding what to do:

   a) Status+control of fundamental system things
   Network manager
   Messaging
   Printing status?

   b) Applications that want a quick way of getting to a function
  b.1) the audio players that provide a play/next/etc menu
  b.2) Monitor settings
  b.3) parcellite (clipboard manager)
  b.4) Volume control

   c) Status+control of special things
  Maybe a device specific thing

I think the indicator scheme probably works well for (a); although
I'm not sure that it's mature enough to be sure - it's starting
to settle out, but the transition has been a bit painful.  These
are about displaying something which may change without you doing
anything and which you might then want to take action on.

Set (b) is interesting; you seem to specifically target the
audio players and the like for using notification icons/menus
for control - but it seems to work perfectly well; there is no
particular reason that you want the full GUI just to hit pause,
I can however see your point that using these icons to (de-)minimise
the main window is a little odd - it is however convenient.

I think the (b) set are interesting that fundamentally they aren't
really used to communicate much status to you other than what
you've told it to do (Volume control shows mute because you asked
it to, Audio player shows current status mostly as feedback;
monitor settings don't show any status and I don't think
parcellite does).

q: What menu would you put a monitor setting applet? Or the Volume ?
   Menus by themselves like they are at the moment?

c) What happens to categories for special things? Maybe a specific
hardware control thing or background computation task?

q: What happens to categories that you aren't using?  If the
number of categories increases the likelihood that you won't
have some of them increases - on this machine I don't have
messaging setup (that's on the one next to it!) but I still have
a cateogry icon for it - that's a bit annoying but if we start
having lots of categories it gets very very messy.

One thing I'd like to add is a consideration of how indicators/notifications
interact with short cut launchers on the panel.

At the moment launchers are entirely passive - if I create a launcher for
an app it might then add a notification icon; this is a waste - what's
really needed here is the ability for the status/menus for an application
to take over the launcher. (I think this is what Macs do these days,
and if I remember correctly what RISC OS used to do many years ago).

Finally, I'd ask that you ensure that the policy of how to display/interact
is as separated as possible from the API; exposing the set of status
and menu interactions of an application is a good idea - whether
it's displayed as an indicator, a notification or elsewhere - so
designing that API well will give the flexibility for future where
people won't have to change their apps much.

Dave
-- 
 -Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code ---   
/ Dr. David Alan Gilbert| Running GNU/Linux on Alpha,68K| Happy  \ 
\ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | MIPS,x86,ARM,SPARC,PPC & HPPA | In Hex /
 \ _|_ http://www.treblig.org   |___/

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Walter Wittel]

Presumably nothing can be added to the notification area without sudo,
so either you are already pwned (game over) or else you can trust the
notification. Not so for pop-up windows.

I think the pop-up Update Manager window was an interesting idea worth
exploring for a couple of releases, but with the ongoing design and
consolidation of notifications it seems the ideal place to return this
functionality to (for consistency and safety).

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 3:46 AM, Conscious User  wrote:
>
>> Disagree. Because update-manager does not require gksudo, there is no
>> screen dimming or anything else that indicates in an obvious manner
>> that it is an actual update window and not a popup coming from the
>> browser.
>>
>> (I'm not talking about popup in the browser window sense, I'm talking
>> about popups in the z-index sense, they can work because it is
>> very common for the user to use the browser fullscreen)
>>
>> Thinking better, *even* with screen dimming the user can be tricked:
>> all it needs is from him to have a dark theme (so the non-dimming
>> of the browser toolbar and the panel would be less noticeable)
>
> To illustrate my point, go to this site:
>
> http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/
>
> and click on an image.
>
> This pretty much convinces me that faking the update window is trivial.
>
>
>
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> Disagree. Because update-manager does not require gksudo, there is no
> screen dimming or anything else that indicates in an obvious manner
> that it is an actual update window and not a popup coming from the
> browser.
> 
> (I'm not talking about popup in the browser window sense, I'm talking
> about popups in the z-index sense, they can work because it is
> very common for the user to use the browser fullscreen)
> 
> Thinking better, *even* with screen dimming the user can be tricked:
> all it needs is from him to have a dark theme (so the non-dimming
> of the browser toolbar and the panel would be less noticeable)

To illustrate my point, go to this site:

http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

and click on an image.

This pretty much convinces me that faking the update window is trivial.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> And you think malware couldn't put up a systray icon tricking you into
> thinking you have updates? You think you would be able to tell the
> difference? The panel icon is just as fakeable as the popup.

Disagree. Because update-manager does not require gksudo, there is no
screen dimming or anything else that indicates in an obvious manner
that it is an actual update window and not a popup coming from the
browser.

(I'm not talking about popup in the browser window sense, I'm talking
about popups in the z-index sense, they can work because it is
very common for the user to use the browser fullscreen)

Thinking better, *even* with screen dimming the user can be tricked:
all it needs is from him to have a dark theme (so the non-dimming
of the browser toolbar and the panel would be less noticeable)

And the most important:

Saying "both alternatives are insecure, so since it will be insecure
anyway let's forget the issue" is not exactly the optimal way of
solving a problem. We should look for a third alternative if needed.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Chow Loong Jin]

On Sunday 25,April,2010 05:55 PM, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> 
> And you think malware couldn't put up a systray icon tricking you into
> thinking you have updates? You think you would be able to tell the
> difference? The panel icon is just as fakeable as the popup.

Frankly speaking, I think I'd have a lot more trouble faking a notification area
icon/indicator or whatever we want to call it these days than a popup, from a
website point of view. I'm talking about all those weird banners that have
Windows-like window borders. These popups can be just as easily spoofed using
Ubuntu-styled window borders.

-- 
Kind regards,
Chow Loong Jin



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Remco]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 11:55, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:
> Some security updates are not active until you reboot. Period. If there is a
> security problem in your kernel, you need a new kernel, and you need to boot
> it. We're done a lot of work to minimise the number of cases where that's
> important, but I'm not aware of any way to eliminate the occasional
> requirement of a reboot.

There is a way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

And it's already in the repos:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=ksplice

That's the kernel part. Some things, like changing a user's list of
groups, still require logging out and in again. But there's no
fundamental reason for a reboot.

-- 
Remco

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 24/04/10 15:20, Jim Rorie wrote:
> But you are penalizing the very people that are helping you.  I can't
> install updates automatically because I'm typically running a late
> alpha, beta or RC to help Ubuntu test it's product.  Or I'm on
> development machine that can't afford to go down because of a badly
> tested patch.
>
> Under your current proposal, here is what I'm supposed to do.  
> 1) Poll updates since I have no indicator.  This is a complete and total
> fail, IMO.

I think there might have been three days in the last six months when
there were no updates to Lucid. It would make more sense to notify you
that there are NO updates today, than that there are updates :-)


>   If there ever was a reason for a notification, it would be
> updates.
>   

Yes and no. Security updates should be top of mind for the user, and
yes, that means having them a little in your face.

Other updates are really irrelevant. They come along, you should do them
every now and then, but they are not worth interrupting you for. If you
wanted them sooner, you could subscribe the the -proposed PPA, if you
wanted them later, you could update monthly, it really doesn't make that
much difference *to the average user*, and failing to see that makes
this conversation very difficult.

> 2) I have to dig through the menu to trigger updates(Hmm, is that
> preferences or administration?  I can never remember).  Annoying for a
> regular task.
>   

Again. Updates are not a regular task for regular users.

I appreciate that you're passionate about the latest builds. If you were
*more* passionate, you might be subscribed to a few of the daily PPAs
for packages you're really interested. But all of this makes you part of
the tiny minority of users for whom this is a matter of some excitement.
It makes you important to us, which is why I'm taking the time to answer
this for the umpteenth time, but it is not a passion we should expect
end-users to share.

> 3) You are going to pop down a dialog on my desktop if I fall off the
> hamster wheel, much like porn spam.  And open a security hole. (More
> later)
> 4) You are going to reboot my system some percentage of the time, thus
> further interrupting my workflow.
>
> This is INSANE!  I'm a committed user that understands the magnitude of
> security patches and updates to the point to be able to assist in bug
> reporting.  And I'm being punished because someone felt people didn't
> understand the update notifier. And now you want to take away my
> usability hack.
>   

Calm down please. Melodrama won't bolster your argument.

Some security updates are not active until you reboot. Period. If there
is a security problem in your kernel, you need a new kernel, and you
need to boot it. We're done a lot of work to minimise the number of
cases where that's important, but I'm not aware of any way to eliminate
the occasional requirement of a reboot.

> A sane solution:
> When the user shuts down, reboots, suspends or resumes(or the screen
> saver if they have suspend turned off), trigger the dialog to ask about
> updates (or provide a button to automatically do them)  The system will
> do the task, reboot/reset or whatever without interrupting the
> workflow.  
>
> These events happen multiple times a day so they are timely. If someone
> says no like 20 times, then you can annoy them. But they probably are
> going to say no then too.
>   

I do believe there is a proposal along these lines in the works, MPT
would comment in detail. It does not make sense to offer this on resume
or unlock, as the user is at that point clearly anxious to get going,
not wrap up. But nevertheless, yes, there are times when it is useful to
offer the option to do something about updates, and we'll do so.

>> That's what MPT is arguing for. Your response is "the crux of the
>> problem is the asynchronous window". But you're missing the point that
>> the underlying condition is both serious and asynchronous.
>> 
> My understanding of the problem is both thorough and profound.
>
>   

But your arguments are not entirely persuasive :-)



>>> Plus, as I pointed out several months ago, this is a HUGE security hole.
>>> Passwords should only be given in response to a user initiated
>>> operation.  Asynchronous dialogs that ask for passwords are a very bad
>>> precedent for a secure O/S.
>>>   
>>>   
>> Best we get those finger-swipe gadgets working, then :-)
>> 
> Not going to solve the problem.  And based on that response I think a
> little analogy is in order.
>
> Let's say I want to do a wire transfer.  I call the bank.  They say
> cool, but we need your credentials to start the transfer.  Since I
> initiated the call, I am pretty confident that I am talking to the bank,
> so I give them my password and my money is on it's way.
>
> Let's look at another scenerio.
>
> You call the bank, but get voicemail.  You leave a message saying you'd
> like to do a wire transfer and hang up.  Several days later you get a
> 

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jim Rorie]

On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 09:56 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> I appreciate the desire to defend the users flow. That's a value we
> share. But being dogmatic about that won't get the best result. We
> should be sparing about interruptions, so that when we do them, people
> pay attention. And we should be very careful about the message we
> convey, so that we minimise the interruption and maximise the chances
> that people will do the right thing.

But you are penalizing the very people that are helping you.  I can't
install updates automatically because I'm typically running a late
alpha, beta or RC to help Ubuntu test it's product.  Or I'm on
development machine that can't afford to go down because of a badly
tested patch.

Under your current proposal, here is what I'm supposed to do.  
1) Poll updates since I have no indicator.  This is a complete and total
fail, IMO.  If there ever was a reason for a notification, it would be
updates.  
2) I have to dig through the menu to trigger updates(Hmm, is that
preferences or administration?  I can never remember).  Annoying for a
regular task.
3) You are going to pop down a dialog on my desktop if I fall off the
hamster wheel, much like porn spam.  And open a security hole. (More
later)
4) You are going to reboot my system some percentage of the time, thus
further interrupting my workflow.

This is INSANE!  I'm a committed user that understands the magnitude of
security patches and updates to the point to be able to assist in bug
reporting.  And I'm being punished because someone felt people didn't
understand the update notifier. And now you want to take away my
usability hack.

A sane solution:
When the user shuts down, reboots, suspends or resumes(or the screen
saver if they have suspend turned off), trigger the dialog to ask about
updates (or provide a button to automatically do them)  The system will
do the task, reboot/reset or whatever without interrupting the
workflow.  

These events happen multiple times a day so they are timely. If someone
says no like 20 times, then you can annoy them. But they probably are
going to say no then too.


> That's what MPT is arguing for. Your response is "the crux of the
> problem is the asynchronous window". But you're missing the point that
> the underlying condition is both serious and asynchronous.

My understanding of the problem is both thorough and profound.

> > Plus, as I pointed out several months ago, this is a HUGE security hole.
> > Passwords should only be given in response to a user initiated
> > operation.  Asynchronous dialogs that ask for passwords are a very bad
> > precedent for a secure O/S.
> >   
> 
> Best we get those finger-swipe gadgets working, then :-)

Not going to solve the problem.  And based on that response I think a
little analogy is in order.

Let's say I want to do a wire transfer.  I call the bank.  They say
cool, but we need your credentials to start the transfer.  Since I
initiated the call, I am pretty confident that I am talking to the bank,
so I give them my password and my money is on it's way.

Let's look at another scenerio.

You call the bank, but get voicemail.  You leave a message saying you'd
like to do a wire transfer and hang up.  Several days later you get a
phone call from a person asking for your bank credentials.  The question
is, is it the bank and do you give them that information?

The first situation is synchronous, the second is asynchronous.  This is
the problem that you have created.  The malware author need no longer
hook into an administrative event to fool the user.  They simply need to
fling a somewhat similar copy on the desktop.  In essence you are
training the user to respond to any dialog that mystically appears on
the desktop at any time.

When Ubuntu becomes a security target, it will be a shooting gallery.










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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> Hrm. whaaat.. 
> Design Communication is essential for the developer community, and for
> the designers to layout the future plans , to co-ordinate the design
> implementation. This part is improving and the design team's blog is the
> start of such improvements.
> 
> This should not be of concern for the end-user. This
> explaining-my-design-to-user communication should not be a priority for
> the design team. Such communications are of little value to the
> end-user, user should never have to read a manual to use the indicators.
> 
> If the design is so bad it needs someone to explain it first , it is a
> design /failure/ .
> We should learn what went wrong and improve it , rather than try to
> explain why the functionality is limited or behaving weirdly.
> 
> If there are such problems of users misunderstanding the indicators and
> resorting to google , it is better to file bugs or bring them to the
> notice of this mailing list rather than insisting on the designers to
> explain it to the user.

Your points would only be valid if all the current usability problems
were caused only by design flaws. But they are also caused by incomplete
implementations.

Take the Me Menu, for example: it is supposed to have broadcasting icons
over the text field, making its purpose more evident. The current
implementation does not have that, and I have not seen *one single
person* who could deduce the purpose of the text field without help.

There is nothing to improve in the design, or bugs to file: the
designers are fully aware that the current implementation is suboptimal,
or the elements it lacks wouldn't be part of the complete specification
in the first place. But it was shipped anyway. And since it was
shipped anyway, the minimum Ubuntu should do out of respect for the
user who's being explicitly exposed to an incomplete implementation
is to be a little bit more helpful than expecting him to Google.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Paulo J. S. Silva]

>
> Plus, as I pointed out several months ago, this is a HUGE security hole.
> Passwords should only be given in response to a user initiated
> operation.  Asynchronous dialogs that ask for passwords are a very bad
> precedent for a secure O/S.
>
>
> Best we get those finger-swipe gadgets working, then :-)
>

I beg to agree with Jim. Yes, it is a HUGE security hole waiting to be
used. As I pointed out in an older thread:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ayatana@lists.launchpad.net/msg00833.html

it is easy to spoof the update manager update dialog inside a web page
using technologies like flash that would probably look
indistinguishable to the real thing. As far as I remember most people
in the thread agreed on the possible security risk associated to the
(not so) new update manager behavior and even an interesting
discussion on allowing password-less updates from trusted repositories
was initiated.

The thread ended up in oblivion as any complains about update manager
behavior though.

best,

Paulo
-- 
Paulo José da Silva e Silva
Professor Associado, Dep. de Ciência da Computação
(Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept.)
Universidade de São Paulo - Brazil

e-mail: pjssi...@ime.usp.br Web: http://www.ime.usp.br/~pjssilva

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Vishnoo]

On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 15:53 +0200, Conscious User wrote:
> > That's true, we haven't done as good a job of communication in the past
> > as we could have. But we're working on improving it. For this issue
> > yesterday there were posts on design.canonical.com,
> > markshuttleworth.com, this mailing list, Twitter, and Identica.
> 
> And I thank you and Mark for those, I'm glad to finally have a more or
> less "central" reference to point people to when they ask me what the
> indicators are all about. :)
> 
> > I'm not sure where would be an appropriate place on the Forums to start
> > the conversation as well. Do you have a suggestion?
> 
> The problem is that the issue is not restricted to the forums. Fact is,
> right now a new user has no way of figuring out the functionality of
> the indicators without Googling. I think users need a "getting started"
> tutorial. The installation slideshow is great but its time is limited
> and there is a limit on what can be explained through text and static
> images.
> 
> What would be *great* is a nice *video* screencast introduction. Time
> and technical requirements aside, it would be awesome if there was a
> professional video with Mark himself or 
> popping up in the middle of a Ubuntu Desktop, pointing and explaining
> specific features. :)
> 
Hrm. whaaat.. 
Design Communication is essential for the developer community, and for
the designers to layout the future plans , to co-ordinate the design
implementation. This part is improving and the design team's blog is the
start of such improvements.

This should not be of concern for the end-user. This
explaining-my-design-to-user communication should not be a priority for
the design team. Such communications are of little value to the
end-user, user should never have to read a manual to use the indicators.

If the design is so bad it needs someone to explain it first , it is a
design /failure/ .
We should learn what went wrong and improve it , rather than try to
explain why the functionality is limited or behaving weirdly.

If there are such problems of users misunderstanding the indicators and
resorting to google , it is better to file bugs or bring them to the
notice of this mailing list rather than insisting on the designers to
explain it to the user.

-- 
Cheers,
Vish


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 22/04/10 21:46, Jim Rorie wrote:
>
>> Jim Rorie wrote on 22/04/10 01:42:
>> 
>>> I have been silent on the update manager issue in the hopes that a sane
>>> solution would present itself.  It hasn't.  Now you are forcing our
>>> hand. So I submit.  What do you intend to do to resolve that fact that
>>> the update manager pops down on the desktop like the old X-10 web ads
>>> that we all utterly despised? :/
>>> ...
>>>   
>> Primarily, simplifying the alert.
>> 
>> 
> But you are still talking about interrupting work flow or confusing the
> user with a with a pop-down that they didn't initiate.

Only in the following cases:

1. There is *a critical security update* that they really should
install. There are few things that are worth interrupting someone's
daily routine for, but this is one of them.

2. There are general updates that have been waiting for a reasonably
long time to be installed.


>   Simplifying the
> dialog doesn't solve the problem.  The asynchronous nature of the dialog
> is the crux of the problem.
>   

In this rough and tumble and highly connected world of fragile hardware
and software, stuff happens, and it happens asynchronously. Your hard
drive might be about to fail. Your machine may be vulnerable to a major
attack. Under some of those circumstances, it really is appropriate to
interrupt the user, because the consequences of them not dealing with
the issue are severe.

I appreciate the desire to defend the users flow. That's a value we
share. But being dogmatic about that won't get the best result. We
should be sparing about interruptions, so that when we do them, people
pay attention. And we should be very careful about the message we
convey, so that we minimise the interruption and maximise the chances
that people will do the right thing.

That's what MPT is arguing for. Your response is "the crux of the
problem is the asynchronous window". But you're missing the point that
the underlying condition is both serious and asynchronous.

> Plus, as I pointed out several months ago, this is a HUGE security hole.
> Passwords should only be given in response to a user initiated
> operation.  Asynchronous dialogs that ask for passwords are a very bad
> precedent for a secure O/S.
>   

Best we get those finger-swipe gadgets working, then :-)

Mark


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 22/04/10 21:26, Martin Owens wrote:
> Hello Mark,
>
> On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 08:49 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
>   
>> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
>> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment,
>> we
>> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
>> configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
>> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
>> the moment. 
>> 
> We've got to be careful about removing things, if we want development
> and ideas to flow around these concepts for future awesomeness, then
> removing them will only increase the barrier between being a passive
> user and becoming an active participent sharing ideas and code.
>
> It's a little hard to participate in something when you don't know it
> exists and there is plenty of examples of great plugins for various
> apps, gnome, inkscape, etc that don't receive any attention at all until
> they've gone upstream and become available to use by a wider audience.
>   

Workspaces have existed in (basically) their current state for the
entire duration that I've been watching, which is a long time, and have
not attracted much in the way of innovation or excitement.

Taking them out might actually spur someone to action ;-)



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Scott Ritchie]

I like where you're going, but what do we do about interoperability?

There's a hint in your post that we'll simply leave apps broken, stick 
up our middle fingers, and tempt developers with our millions of users. 
 That may work for open source projects in our repository, but we need 
to accept the reality that there will be programs that don't conform.


The most obvious example is any software originally written for Windows 
and running in Wine.  Wine uses XEmbed to create its own systray, and 
the most reasonable place to put Wine's system tray is the notification 
area.


Any design that breaks this completely would be a regression for the 40% 
of our users that run Wine apps.  So let's not break it.


Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

On 04/21/2010 01:44 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Hi folks

On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our
plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu
by 11.04.

Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too.


Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?

Thanks
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Tyler Brainerd]

In interest of further and slightly more organized discussion, I'm finally
starting a blog that I've been meaning to for sometime, about usability (I
know, another one) in the interest of eventually developing ideas, not just
talking about them. If you're interested in any of the idea's I've presented
so far, please join me there and discuss some ideas of how to use Ubuntu
better, particularly concerning Desktops. I'll eventually (soon) be posting
mockups and detailed explanations of how I desire to use workspaces, but for
now (and the reason I want to do it in a blog and not in email) I am trying
to lay foundation of how and why we use virtual desktops, and what a
perfect-world virtual desktop would behave like.

you can find the blog at:

http://tjamesubuntu.blogspot.com/

I'm working on the first post right now,
It'll go up sometime in the next 6 hours. :D I've got a lot of thinking to
do.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Tyler Brainerd wrote:

> Specifically concerning the idea of a constant place to minimize windows
> too, on a parallel fork of the original email run, we've been discussing
> this. I don't know if anyone likes my idea as of yet, but I'm going to keep
> repeating it anyway. :D
>
> The beginning of the discussion centered on an idea of tabbing workspaces
> to the top. I, honestly, don't like that idea. Rather, I think a more
> practical option would be to add an ability to create tabbed 'widget'
> overlay workspaces, that are the same between 2, 4, or a hundred workspaces.
> so on workspace one, the first tab is the standard workspace tab, the second
> is the first widget layer, the third is a second widget layer. on workspace
> 2, the first tab is workspace 2, the second is the first widget layer which
> is identical to the first widget layer that was on the first, and the third,
> the third. So the tabs are layers which exist seperately from the standard
> desktops, and are accessible from each of them.
>
> In use, this would turn into the user being able to click to either of
> these layers (or more, however many you want) and open up long running
> applications, like email or IM or music. These would be, presumably, still
> controlled from the messenging menu and upcoming sound menus, but the user
> can click to the layer to access the full program. This would prevent
> clutter in several ways.
>
> First of all, the user doesn't have to devote whole workspaces to always on
> apps. I don't like that if i'm working on a lot of documents, evolution
> sticks out like a sore thumb on expo. It takes up a whole workspace. I don't
> like that if i start a IM conversation, i have to cycle around to find where
> i left it.
>
> second, it cuts down on need for so many workspaces. With this added
> feature, i'd go from 4 to 2. I wouldn't need so many, because i'm devoting
> whole workspaces to programs that could be hidden away better.
>
> This whole idea doesn't necessarily have to be on tabs on the panel. I'm
> just thinking that it would be great to make stackable widget layers, not
> just one, that can be on the fly assigned any application that you can open
> and put in it. As default, this would benefit the user far more then
> multiple desktops, as it is much easier to visualize, and I think is what
> more people use multiple desktops for. Eventually, power users will use
> multiple desktops in addition to it.
>
> This is long. ha.
>
> In practical sense, think of the desktop as a binder open on a table.
> You're working on it, you have multiple documents, happiness. But say you
> want to pull out a totally unrelated thing. Do you want to scoot down the
> table to a new spot? Or is just a quick task? A new desktop is good for
> sometasks, but for just quick access, it makes much more sense to just set a
> whole new binder on top of the current one, completely covering it. You can
> open other documents, email, whatever. Its seperate, its contained. You have
> a paper that you want to bring back. So pull it out, put that binder away,
> and take the document back to your binder on the table, and set it down with
> everything else you're working on. Quick, easy, and makes total sense in
> real work flow.
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 6:02 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas 
> wrote:
>
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> Dylan McCall wrote on 22/04/10 04:50:
>> >...
>> > First of all, I think it would be worth investigating sound effects
>> > attached to indicators. Doing it through the indicator applet means we
>> > can (if desired) use Canberra's awesome ca_gtk_play_for_widget function
>> > (which means beautiful positional audio).
>>
>> I don't understand why sound effects would be attached to individual
>> menus. Can you give an example or two?
>>
>> > Secondly, I think it's really important to explore the window list at
>> > this point. As others have mentioned, this is all doing a nice job of
>> > establishing what certain APIs are for and 

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 22:40, Conscious User  wrote:
>
>> If people don't figure out how to use something we designed, the answer
>> is to improve the design, and not to mount a campaign to educate them :-)
>>
>> By which I mean that the pieces should feel more natural, and getting
>> things done should be more natural, or we're not succeeding.
>
> It is a noble goal and I support it 100%, but let's not forget that,
> as good as the indicators are and as bad as the notification area is,
> the notification area is what people are used to. So a little push
> might be necessary to overcome the natural resistance to change.
>
> Also, there is a limit to how natural something can be. I have
> absolutely no idea how we could make obvious to a first time user
> that the indicator-messages icon is supposed to change when you
> receive a new message, for example.

that's right, certain things might create a difficult learning curve.
we should always keep one eye on the excellent advice found in the
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, which is a perfect reference for
everything you want to design, even a house or a toaster.

this particular case you are describing will still not be so terribly
bad on the novice:
colors become self-explaining, once you see the bubbles with them.
the indicator menus are also buttons and actual menus, not only notifiers.
the button aspect is naturally apparent already

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Tyler Brainerd]

Specifically concerning the idea of a constant place to minimize windows
too, on a parallel fork of the original email run, we've been discussing
this. I don't know if anyone likes my idea as of yet, but I'm going to keep
repeating it anyway. :D

The beginning of the discussion centered on an idea of tabbing workspaces to
the top. I, honestly, don't like that idea. Rather, I think a more practical
option would be to add an ability to create tabbed 'widget' overlay
workspaces, that are the same between 2, 4, or a hundred workspaces. so on
workspace one, the first tab is the standard workspace tab, the second is
the first widget layer, the third is a second widget layer. on workspace 2,
the first tab is workspace 2, the second is the first widget layer which is
identical to the first widget layer that was on the first, and the third,
the third. So the tabs are layers which exist seperately from the standard
desktops, and are accessible from each of them.

In use, this would turn into the user being able to click to either of these
layers (or more, however many you want) and open up long running
applications, like email or IM or music. These would be, presumably, still
controlled from the messenging menu and upcoming sound menus, but the user
can click to the layer to access the full program. This would prevent
clutter in several ways.

First of all, the user doesn't have to devote whole workspaces to always on
apps. I don't like that if i'm working on a lot of documents, evolution
sticks out like a sore thumb on expo. It takes up a whole workspace. I don't
like that if i start a IM conversation, i have to cycle around to find where
i left it.

second, it cuts down on need for so many workspaces. With this added
feature, i'd go from 4 to 2. I wouldn't need so many, because i'm devoting
whole workspaces to programs that could be hidden away better.

This whole idea doesn't necessarily have to be on tabs on the panel. I'm
just thinking that it would be great to make stackable widget layers, not
just one, that can be on the fly assigned any application that you can open
and put in it. As default, this would benefit the user far more then
multiple desktops, as it is much easier to visualize, and I think is what
more people use multiple desktops for. Eventually, power users will use
multiple desktops in addition to it.

This is long. ha.

In practical sense, think of the desktop as a binder open on a table. You're
working on it, you have multiple documents, happiness. But say you want to
pull out a totally unrelated thing. Do you want to scoot down the table to a
new spot? Or is just a quick task? A new desktop is good for sometasks, but
for just quick access, it makes much more sense to just set a whole new
binder on top of the current one, completely covering it. You can open other
documents, email, whatever. Its seperate, its contained. You have a paper
that you want to bring back. So pull it out, put that binder away, and take
the document back to your binder on the table, and set it down with
everything else you're working on. Quick, easy, and makes total sense in
real work flow.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 6:02 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Dylan McCall wrote on 22/04/10 04:50:
> >...
> > First of all, I think it would be worth investigating sound effects
> > attached to indicators. Doing it through the indicator applet means we
> > can (if desired) use Canberra's awesome ca_gtk_play_for_widget function
> > (which means beautiful positional audio).
>
> I don't understand why sound effects would be attached to individual
> menus. Can you give an example or two?
>
> > Secondly, I think it's really important to explore the window list at
> > this point. As others have mentioned, this is all doing a nice job of
> > establishing what certain APIs are for and making sure they don't get
> > misused. However, we're lacking a replacement for one of the more
> > popular misuses: notification icons for minimization.
>
> Yes.
>
> > One thing that occurs to me is to change the window list into a more
> > physical place that you can move windows to. So, "minimized" windows
> > appear there, and are available there, no matter what workspace you're
> > on. It would no longer list windows unless they are minimized. Pretty
> > substantial change, but maybe I can do a mockup or something if
> > anyone's interested :)
>
> I'm interested. :-)
>
> >...
> > I was a bit worried upon reading “And further, everything is becoming a
> > single set of menus.” I could be interpreting it wrong, but this sounds
> > like everything is going to be stuck in the same space at the top right
> > even though they are all neatly categorized. I think there should be
> > separation between these different categories of indicators in some
> > form. For example, substantial whitespace between app indicators
> > (including indicator-messages) and system-related indicators (battery,
> > session). Are 

Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jim Rorie]

On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 13:48 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: 
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Jim Rorie wrote on 22/04/10 01:42:
> >...
> > 
> > In short, what provisions have you made to provide the same short cut
> > functionality without introducing additional clicks?
> 
> Much of the time you won't need to switch to the player; you'll be able
> to perform common actions directly from the menu.

Can you give examples of either case?  "Much of the time" is where the
devil lives.

For example: Would a person be able to swipe the sound icon and see the
playing track.  Would they be able to pause the track from the top level
menu?  Both of these are de facto features on popular players (Banshee,
amarok and Mediamonkey on Windows) and contribute to usability. 


> > I have been silent on the update manager issue in the hopes that a sane
> > solution would present itself.  It hasn't.  Now you are forcing our
> > hand. So I submit.  What do you intend to do to resolve that fact that
> > the update manager pops down on the desktop like the old X-10 web ads
> > that we all utterly despised? :/
> >...
> 
> Primarily, simplifying the alert.
> 

But you are still talking about interrupting work flow or confusing the
user with a with a pop-down that they didn't initiate.  Simplifying the
dialog doesn't solve the problem.  The asynchronous nature of the dialog
is the crux of the problem.

Plus, as I pointed out several months ago, this is a HUGE security hole.
Passwords should only be given in response to a user initiated
operation.  Asynchronous dialogs that ask for passwords are a very bad
precedent for a secure O/S.


> Secondarily, working on ways to reduce its frequency without
> compromising security. One example is increasing the proportion of
> people who download updates in the background and install them at
> shutdown. Another is prompting people to install any pending updates at
> the same time as they install an application in Ubuntu Software Center.

Why is this secondary?  Why don't you configure the update process to
download the updates and provide an install option at shutdown or
restart by default.  This will fix the problem once and for all.  That's
where it logically belongs as reboots are necessarily part of the
process in many cases. It's synchronous as it is initiated by the user
attempt to change the state of the system.





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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> If people don't figure out how to use something we designed, the answer
> is to improve the design, and not to mount a campaign to educate them :-)
> 
> By which I mean that the pieces should feel more natural, and getting
> things done should be more natural, or we're not succeeding.

It is a noble goal and I support it 100%, but let's not forget that,
as good as the indicators are and as bad as the notification area is,
the notification area is what people are used to. So a little push
might be necessary to overcome the natural resistance to change.

Also, there is a limit to how natural something can be. I have
absolutely no idea how we could make obvious to a first time user
that the indicator-messages icon is supposed to change when you
receive a new message, for example.


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Martin Owens]

Hello Mark,

On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 08:49 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment,
> we
> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> the moment. 

We've got to be careful about removing things, if we want development
and ideas to flow around these concepts for future awesomeness, then
removing them will only increase the barrier between being a passive
user and becoming an active participent sharing ideas and code.

It's a little hard to participate in something when you don't know it
exists and there is plenty of examples of great plugins for various
apps, gnome, inkscape, etc that don't receive any attention at all until
they've gone upstream and become available to use by a wider audience.

Martin,


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Luke Benstead]

On 22 April 2010 18:14, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:
> Conscious User wrote:
>> " 1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
>> of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
>> example, is overwhelming.
>
> If people don't figure out how to use something we designed, the answer
> is to improve the design, and not to mount a campaign to educate them :-)
>

Slightly OT: I know the indicators don't have tooltips as an
experiment to see if they are just cruft, and I know tooltips in the
notification area were being abused just as much as the notification
area itself. But I really think a hint like the ones on the
Application, System and Places menus would help. Even if it was just
"Read incoming messages and launch messaging applications" or
something. Icons can certainly go a long way at conveying the purpose
of something, but does an envelope mean "Send an email" or "Check or
email" or "Start the email program" or "Send a fax"? I think putting
sensible "this does xyz" tooltips might really aid discoverability.

One thing I really like about tooltips is they don't appear
immediately. This sort of mimics life outside of the computer; if you
are to make a decision to do something, you'll sometimes pause to
decide whether it's what you want to do. I find tooltips can give that
nice little nudge to say "yep, you do want this" or "no, this isn't
the menu you're looking for".

Anyway, just my $0.02

Luke.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Conscious User wrote:
> " 1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
> of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
> example, is overwhelming.

If people don't figure out how to use something we designed, the answer
is to improve the design, and not to mount a campaign to educate them :-)

By which I mean that the pieces should feel more natural, and getting
things done should be more natural, or we're not succeeding.

I'd be very interested in data that could guide the evolution of things
like the messaging menu.

Mark



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Jeremy Nickurak wrote on 21/04/10 21:58:
> 
> AFAIK, this is a major deviation from what upstream and other
> distributions are doing, even larger than that of notify-osd.

We'll be working as closely as possible with the developers of all those
applications that currently use the notification area. It's
counterproductive for us to be carrying lots of patches in Ubuntu.

> Is there any sign of uptake of the indicator suite of protocols
> upstream or in any other distributions? Why or why not? Gnome-shell
> certainly seems to be going a different direction, and the
> repurcussions of that have seen scarce discussion here..

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne?highlight=application+indicators

>...
> Any sign of the indicator suite of protocols seeing uptake at
> somewhere vendor-neutral, like freedesktop.org?
>...

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-February/msg00036.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-December/011179.html

There's been some interesting discussion in both places, but people seem
to be waiting for us to demonstrate that it works. So, here we are.

Cheers
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Sense Hofstede]

On 21 April 2010 22:44, Matthew Paul Thomas  wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi folks
>
> On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our
> plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu
> by 11.04. 
>
> Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too.
> 
>
> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?
>
> Thanks
> - --
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/
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>
Hello,

The ideas sound great to me! It makes a lot of sense, both from a
design perspective as well as from a user perspective, to have a
single, consistent way to access common tasks.

However, something that I am afraid of is that it might turn out that
this great plan will end up meaning a lot of duplicating work with
regards to GNOME Shell and GNOME 3.0. There are plans for the
notification area and systems in GNOME Shell and they might not be
fully compatible with Ubuntu. Canonical could of course propose to do
the notification part of GNOME 3.0 and make Ayatana a part of it, but
I feel that a lot of people would be very unhappy with that. Remains
tricky business, but I do think that Ubuntu has both the legal and the
moral right to adapt GNOME to its wishes, so if it is decided to use a
heavily modified GNOME version, why not?

The unified notificators would provide a wonderful way to integrate
the user's application of choice in the system. Ubuntu chooses a
default set of applications and of course the system should integrate
with them well. They were chosen for a reason and they are installed
by default, so it makes sense to give integrating them preference over
integrating everything. But I do think that it should be possible to
make other applications the default subjects of the notificators.

Furthermore, users often don't care much what the name of their
application is, they just want the same icon and the same way of
accessing the same type of information. You might have experienced the
panic of some Windows users when the blue 'E' had disappeared from
their desktops: they had started to associate the logo of Internet
Explorer with the Internet.

Considering the two things I mentioned above I think I agree with the
approach used in Indicator Messages, that the best way to implement
the notificators would be by using the category or the type of the
information the notificator is providing access to. This would require
a solid defaults API and this would make the notificators the default
way to access the default application for thing X. Other applications
could use this.

Another advantage is that it would (or could) provide easy access to
default resources. Examples: a download manager or a status menu could
be read and modified by applications wanting to manipulate that
information. The notificators would make sure the rest of the system
would be reached as well and that everything gets nicely integrated
into the system.

Mark already said that DBus has been chosen as the way to communicate.
A very sound decision if you want to allow different applications to
be the default. If they all use the same protocol it's just a matter
of switching address and the default has been changed with the user
noticing it.

I would like to end with saying that I appreciate the effort made my
the Design Team to improve the communication with the rest of the
Ubuntu Community. Writing blog posts and managing discussions like
these cost a lot of time and energy, but it is vital to being listened
to. It would be a shame if this wonderful ideas would end up being
thoroughly disliked by parts of the community just because they feel
the changes are forced upon them, and not necessarily because they
don't agree. Thank you!

Regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də]

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> That's true, we haven't done as good a job of communication in the past
> as we could have. But we're working on improving it. For this issue
> yesterday there were posts on design.canonical.com,
> markshuttleworth.com, this mailing list, Twitter, and Identica.

And I thank you and Mark for those, I'm glad to finally have a more or
less "central" reference to point people to when they ask me what the
indicators are all about. :)

> I'm not sure where would be an appropriate place on the Forums to start
> the conversation as well. Do you have a suggestion?

The problem is that the issue is not restricted to the forums. Fact is,
right now a new user has no way of figuring out the functionality of
the indicators without Googling. I think users need a "getting started"
tutorial. The installation slideshow is great but its time is limited
and there is a limit on what can be explained through text and static
images.

What would be *great* is a nice *video* screencast introduction. Time
and technical requirements aside, it would be awesome if there was a
professional video with Mark himself or 
popping up in the middle of a Ubuntu Desktop, pointing and explaining
specific features. :)

With respect to the forums, I'm gonna give a controversial suggestion:
the Lucid (soon to be Maverick) section needs to be more strictly
moderated and controlled than the other sections. If someone repeats
a question, the thread should be immediately closed and forgotten
after the user is referred to an already given answer. And the most
common answers should be made into stickies. Rants that confuse bugs
with design decisions should also be immediately closed.

> I'm not familiar with how heavily Empathy has been patched, but in
> general, that's a QA process problem, not an engineering problem. Bug
> reports on Ubuntu applications should be reported at
> bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu. They should then be reposted upstream *if*
> they also exist in the upstream version.

I agree, but anyway the bug reporting part was not the main point.

What I want to emphasize is what I said in the beginning of the
paragraph, that more emphasis should be put on backwards
compatibility.  In the case of Empathy, either the patches
should be improved to gracefully degrade when indicator-messages
is not present or a empathy-vanilla package should be made
available in the repositories.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Diego Moya]

On 22 April 2010 12:59, Vishnoo wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 08:49 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
>> On 22/04/10 04:27, Robin Anderson wrote:
>> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
>> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
>> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
>> configure two workspaces.
>
> For 10.04 , we now ship with 4 workspaces as the default.
>
> Oh workspaces are one of the better ways to actually manage /not/
> minimizing a long-running-app to systray, err, notification area ;-)
>
> IMO , workspaces are one of the untapped resources , we havent been able
> to use workspaces to the full potential [yet].

The problem with workspaces is, they require too much manual handling
to benefit from their organization. You have to think in advance what
applications want together to open them in the same workspace, or
spend some time rearranging them every time you need a different
arrangement.

I know I only use workspaces when the current desktop is in the "too
cluttered" space and I need a fresh start to begin a new unrelated
task. (BTW this is also how I use tabs in tabbed browsers. There's a
common pattern for an uncovered need laying somewhere here).


>
> What can be done is have Task-based workspaces, similar to the grouping
> the apps in the messaging menu , we could have the messaging apps stay
> in only one workspace. To probably do this well, we'd need to get a good
> set of personas.

This would help with the "where should I open this application", they
could be automatically sorted to the correct workspace when opened.
But doesn't cover the need for simultaneous tasks ("I want to work on
this document while following an IM conversation"), nor helps with new
kind of tasks for which there isn't a predefined configuration.

IMHO the preferred solution would be some lightweight interaction that
allowed to mix and match windows from several workspaces without
requiring to rearrange them one by one. Maybe something like the
Picture-in-picture feature found in TVs. The preview feature already
available in the panel workspace selector can serve as the basis for
this "simultaneous awareness of several workspace contents".



> Would it be wise to open a wiki page and have a list of applications
> that use the notification area? [if we narrow it down , we would
> probably we stuck with 10-20 apps which need a good alternative..]
> And Work out each application's use of the area and then work out the
> best way to handle them?

I think that would be great, yes. Some task analysis based on the
current popular usages and how they interact with each other, before
creating a new global organization scheme.

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Conscious User wrote on 21/04/10 22:28:
>...
> As a regular reader of Ubuntu Forums, I know for a fact that there are
> two things in Ayatana that really need improving:
>
> 1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
> of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
> example, is overwhelming. And I cannot really blame them in those
> cases. What should I say? "Well, it's obvious if you were subscribed
> in the Ayatana list, or saw these technical and developer-oriented
> specification wikis or saw this specific post of this developer's
> blog whose name you didn't even know until now..."

That's true, we haven't done as good a job of communication in the past
as we could have. But we're working on improving it. For this issue
yesterday there were posts on design.canonical.com,
markshuttleworth.com, this mailing list, Twitter, and Identica.

I'm not sure where would be an appropriate place on the Forums to start
the conversation as well. Do you have a suggestion?

> 2) Making easy to revert to the original behavior, at least until
> *full* feature-parity is reached. I'm not talking about a GUI, but
> recompilation should not be required. The main example of how this
> is currently lacking is Empathy. If the user does not like NotifyOSD,
> he can install notification-daemon. But if he does that, the heavily
> patched Ubuntu version of Empathy becomes broken. And because the end
> user has no obligation of knowing what came from Ubuntu patches, who
> also ends up suffering is upstream bug triagers, who have to deal with
> a lot of misdirected reports. This is creating a lot of bad blood and
> earning Ubuntu a very bad reputation among both upstream developers
> and end users.
>...

I'm not familiar with how heavily Empathy has been patched, but in
general, that's a QA process problem, not an engineering problem. Bug
reports on Ubuntu applications should be reported at
bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu. They should then be reposted upstream *if*
they also exist in the upstream version.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Dylan McCall wrote on 22/04/10 04:50:
>...
> First of all, I think it would be worth investigating sound effects
> attached to indicators. Doing it through the indicator applet means we
> can (if desired) use Canberra's awesome ca_gtk_play_for_widget function
> (which means beautiful positional audio).

I don't understand why sound effects would be attached to individual
menus. Can you give an example or two?

> Secondly, I think it's really important to explore the window list at
> this point. As others have mentioned, this is all doing a nice job of
> establishing what certain APIs are for and making sure they don't get
> misused. However, we're lacking a replacement for one of the more
> popular misuses: notification icons for minimization.

Yes.

> One thing that occurs to me is to change the window list into a more
> physical place that you can move windows to. So, "minimized" windows
> appear there, and are available there, no matter what workspace you're
> on. It would no longer list windows unless they are minimized. Pretty
> substantial change, but maybe I can do a mockup or something if
> anyone's interested :)

I'm interested. :-)

>...
> I was a bit worried upon reading “And further, everything is becoming a
> single set of menus.” I could be interpreting it wrong, but this sounds
> like everything is going to be stuck in the same space at the top right
> even though they are all neatly categorized. I think there should be
> separation between these different categories of indicators in some
> form. For example, substantial whitespace between app indicators
> (including indicator-messages) and system-related indicators (battery,
> session). Are we on the same page?
>...

The history of operating systems is a history of applications getting
sucked in to the base system. The clock used to be a separate
application; now it's a standard part of the environment. Connecting to
the Internet used to be a separate utility; now it's a standard part of
the environment. IM status used to be in application-specific widgets;
with the me menu we're attempting to make it a standard part of the
environment.

I expect this slow trend to continue. A simple example is the battery
status menu, which is currently a custom one (a patch to
gnome-power-manager) but will soon migrate to the system area. So custom
to systemic is a continuum, and I don't think it's useful to have a
visual barrier between them. The system ones will be grouped at the end
of the panel, and in a fixed order, and that's probably enough.

Cheers
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Matthew Paul Thomas
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Jim Rorie wrote on 22/04/10 01:42:
>...
> A prominent example is that of the music player.  Short of having a
> window open to get in your way, the NA icon gives you a way to control
> the player with a minimum number of clicks and no window management
> issues.  I fear that embedding a player in yet another level of
> hierarchy is going reduce usability in the march to bring order to the
> desktop.  
> 
> In short, what provisions have you made to provide the same short cut
> functionality without introducing additional clicks?

Much of the time you won't need to switch to the player; you'll be able
to perform common actions directly from the menu.

> 2) I personally tweak the update notifier on all my machine (internal
> and ones I build for others) to revert the old notification icon
> scheme. It saves me a lot of trouble and questions, particularly with
> people that are not particularly computer literate.  A lot of people do this.
> It's a pretty popular mod.  
> 
> I have been silent on the update manager issue in the hopes that a sane
> solution would present itself.  It hasn't.  Now you are forcing our
> hand. So I submit.  What do you intend to do to resolve that fact that
> the update manager pops down on the desktop like the old X-10 web ads
> that we all utterly despised? :/
>...

Primarily, simplifying the alert.


Secondarily, working on ways to reduce its frequency without
compromising security. One example is increasing the proportion of
people who download updates in the background and install them at
shutdown. Another is prompting people to install any pending updates at
the same time as they install an application in Ubuntu Software Center.

Cheers
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Frederik Nnaji wrote on 22/04/10 02:29:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 23:04, Shane Fagan
>  wrote:
>...
>> I think the target is far enough but I wouldnt like to remove it from
>> the default install until upstreams adopt the new spec fully. Which
>> will take a long enough time. I think remove it cold turkey from the
>> next LTS release just to give it fair warning to universe app
>> developers/maintainers to patch their apps accordingly.
> 
> LTS sounds like an intelligent goal.
> if things upstream happen to move along faster due to the evolutive
> leaps in overall usability nowadays, earlier dates might become
> possible as we go..
>...

In contrast, the first comment to my post on design.canonical.com was
complaining about how slow the process will be. :-)

If we set a goal of the next LTS -- *four* releases away -- it would be
easy for developers to neglect it or not take it seriously. So we've
thrown our cap over the wall here. Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10, and
Ubuntu 11.04.

Together with Jorge Castro, I'll be spending a portion of my time over
the next year coordinating the transition, giving design advice, and
seeking patches for applications. The more help we can have, the better.

Cheers
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Benjamin Humphrey]

Conscious User:

"1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
example, is overwhelming. And I cannot really blame them in those
cases. What should I say? "Well, it's obvious if you were subscribed
in the Ayatana list, or saw these technical and developer-oriented
specification wikis or saw this specific post of this developer's
blog whose name you didn't even know until now...""

I agree completely and I know that the design team are very much aware of
this. We're working on improving communication with the community, and you
should see some results of this in the next cycle.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:

> Just to make sure you get enough feedback...
>
> Workspaces is the one feature that made me think my Linux desktop is
> clearly superior to windows. The ability to organize niches for
> different uses like work, internet, fun (music and video), and easily
> switch between then is great. Instead of getting rid of workspaces I
> truly believe we should find ways to improve them and present them to
> the masses.
>
> Paulo
>
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Mark Shuttleworth 
> wrote:
> > On 22/04/10 04:27, Robin Anderson wrote:
> >> One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets
> >> into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification
> >> area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put
> >> applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual
> >> desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at
> >> least the past several releases, has only had two workspaces on by
> >> default so I take it there isn't much of a focus to get average users
> >> (read: users that don't change default settings) to use them, but they
> >> are quite useful and I'd go so far as to compare them to how a person
> >> feels after using a dual monitor setup for a little while compared to
> >> always using a single monitor.
> >
> > It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> > like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
> > do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> > configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> > workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> > the moment.
> >
> > I'd welcome a discussion about how we could make workspaces *great*. If
> > we can do that, then we would make more of them. And your contribution
> > above is a useful start: great workspaces give you easy access to some
> > apps regardless of the workspace you happen to be in.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > ___
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> > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana
> > More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Paulo José da Silva e Silva
> Professor Associado, Dep. de Ciência da Computação
> (Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept.)
> Universidade de São Paulo - Brazil
>
> e-mail: pjssi...@ime.usp.br Web: http://www.ime.usp.br/~pjssilva
>
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-- 
Benjamin Humphrey

Ubuntu Manual Team Lead
Dunedin, New Zealand

http://www.ubuntu-manual.org
www.interesting.co.nz
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Paulo J. S. Silva]

Just to make sure you get enough feedback...

Workspaces is the one feature that made me think my Linux desktop is
clearly superior to windows. The ability to organize niches for
different uses like work, internet, fun (music and video), and easily
switch between then is great. Instead of getting rid of workspaces I
truly believe we should find ways to improve them and present them to
the masses.

Paulo

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:
> On 22/04/10 04:27, Robin Anderson wrote:
>> One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets
>> into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification
>> area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put
>> applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual
>> desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at
>> least the past several releases, has only had two workspaces on by
>> default so I take it there isn't much of a focus to get average users
>> (read: users that don't change default settings) to use them, but they
>> are quite useful and I'd go so far as to compare them to how a person
>> feels after using a dual monitor setup for a little while compared to
>> always using a single monitor.
>
> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> the moment.
>
> I'd welcome a discussion about how we could make workspaces *great*. If
> we can do that, then we would make more of them. And your contribution
> above is a useful start: great workspaces give you easy access to some
> apps regardless of the workspace you happen to be in.
>
> Mark
>
>
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>
>



-- 
Paulo José da Silva e Silva
Professor Associado, Dep. de Ciência da Computação
(Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept.)
Universidade de São Paulo - Brazil

e-mail: pjssi...@ime.usp.br Web: http://www.ime.usp.br/~pjssilva

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Thorsten Wilms]

On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 20:27 -0700, Robin Anderson wrote:
> One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets
> into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification
> area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put
> applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual
> desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running.

If you set a window to Always_on_Visible_Workspace and minimize it, its
button will be shown in the window list on every workspace.

Noteworthy differences are that it's a comparatively large button
instead of an icon, and that the placement will change depending on
other windows on every workspace.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Vishnoo]

On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 08:49 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> On 22/04/10 04:27, Robin Anderson wrote:
> > One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets
> > into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification
> > area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put
> > applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual
> > desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at
> > least the past several releases, has only had two workspaces on by
> > default so I take it there isn't much of a focus to get average users
> > (read: users that don't change default settings) to use them, but they
> > are quite useful and I'd go so far as to compare them to how a person
> > feels after using a dual monitor setup for a little while compared to
> > always using a single monitor.
> 
> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> configure two workspaces.

For 10.04 , we now ship with 4 workspaces as the default.

>  I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> the moment.
> 

Oh workspaces are one of the better ways to actually manage /not/
minimizing a long-running-app to systray, err, notification area ;-)

IMO , workspaces are one of the untapped resources , we havent been able
to use workspaces to the full potential [yet].

What can be done is have Task-based workspaces, similar to the grouping
the apps in the messaging menu , we could have the messaging apps stay
in only one workspace. To probably do this well, we'd need to get a good
set of personas.

Cleaning up the notification area is an interesting task , but more
importantly : 
Why are the users sending apps to the notification area? 
How are people using the tiny icon in their workflow?
Is removing it going to improve their worflow?

Would it be wise to open a wiki page and have a list of applications
that use the notification area? [if we narrow it down , we would
probably we stuck with 10-20 apps which need a good alternative..]
And Work out each application's use of the area and then work out the
best way to handle them?
I dont think we are doing it right by just saying "nothing stays there"
and trying to find a one stop solution for all.

-- 
Cheers,
Vish


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[David Balch]

On 22 April 2010 08:49, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:

> The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> the moment.

Presumably you mean shipping with only one workspace enabled by
default, rather than removing the feature altogether.

I think that - even if it isn't in the best possible state - hiding
this excellent feature would be a mistake.
It's a significant feature that Mac users new to Ubuntu would miss,
and Windows users new to Ubuntu would benefit from (if they can
discover it).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
http://www.witchesband.com/

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Robin Anderson]

Since I just joined this list I don't know of an easy way to reply to the
messages sent so far in this thread so I'll say here, I definitely agree
with everything in the thread so far; quality suggestions.


For how to have minimized applications available on all workspaces: My first
thought was to have a kind of new separate Window List but for icons and
basically the same as how the Notification Area is currently used, but if
the Design Team wants to get away from that then it limits the options.
Perhaps make such a new thing but it is somehow technically strict about
what can be done with it; only allow certain responses for left click,
double left click, right click, etc. There might be some relevant user
interaction studies out there. I will have to this about this.


About removing the workspaces from default installs: Doing so with an alpha
or beta would probably get a lot of public discussion going (this is related
to the earlier comment about the public not really being aware of 'inner
workings' even if they're on a something like a public mailing list) similar
to the now infamous window button placement. I use 10 workspaces myself and
I recognize I'm definitely not the average user, but I would really prefer
if actual releases of Ubuntu still included them so application designers
would still keep them in mind even if they only plan to target Ubuntu, for
cross-distro compatibility if anything else.

There was that Esfera talk not too long ago and more recently the window
button placement, so if Ubuntu is moving into either a more
touchscreen-friendly setup by default or more Mac-OS-X-oriented, the
suggestions I would make for how to handle a workspace system. But assuming
a desktop-oriented usage scenario: I think the Workspace Switcher and
workspaces themselves would get a lot more used if moving windows between
workspaces was easier. The expo feature in Compiz being enabled by default
and popularized in release literature could maybe work towards that. Perhaps
a program to do what Compiz expo does but doesn't require Compiz or 3d
acceleration could be made for people without capable graphics hardware.

I do recognize that workspaces / virtual desktops are not average user
friendly in the sense that the iPhone OS or Chrome / Chromium OS is but even
Mac OS X with its reputation for ease still fits in features that probably
only more intermediate/advanced people will even use, namely Expose, Spaces
and Time Machine. This is probably more than obvious but just to raise the
topic, one of the first places I would look is Mac OS X's Spaces since it's
the first virtual desktop system to be in wide use by the 'masses'.


Also on the topic of how icons are used, using the right click menu to
provide access to mini-controls might be something to look into. I haven't
used them but I hear newer versions of Windows 7 and Mac OS X do this. I see
it working especially with media players, direct access to controls and all
from one click.


Anzan, he might be thinking from the perspective of super-average users, the
users that get to facebook by typing "facebook" into Google, I call them the
'masses' (less nicely called the 'unwashed masses' sometimes). I was just
thinking about how something like the iPhone might do workspace switching
and remembered it's getting mulitasking soon, so that may be a place to look
for super-simple workspace switching.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:49 AM, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:

> On 22/04/10 04:27, Robin Anderson wrote:
> > One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets
> > into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification
> > area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put
> > applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual
> > desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at
> > least the past several releases, has only had two workspaces on by
> > default so I take it there isn't much of a focus to get average users
> > (read: users that don't change default settings) to use them, but they
> > are quite useful and I'd go so far as to compare them to how a person
> > feels after using a dual monitor setup for a little while compared to
> > always using a single monitor.
>
> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> the moment.
>
> I'd welcome a discussion about how we could make workspaces *great*. If
> we can do that, then we would make more of them. And your contribution
> above is a useful start: great workspaces give you easy access to some
> apps regardless of the workspace you happen to be in.
>
> Mark
>
>
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Anzan Hoshin Roshi]

On 22 April 2010 03:49, Mark Shuttleworth  wrote:

>
> It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
> like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
> do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
> configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
> workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
> the moment.
>
> I'd welcome a discussion about how we could make workspaces *great*. If
> we can do that, then we would make more of them. And your contribution
> above is a useful start: great workspaces give you easy access to some
> apps regardless of the workspace you happen to be in.
>
>
Mark, I'm puzzled. What isn't already great about workspaces?

I tend to use six to eight depending upon my uses on a particular machine
with one assigned to internet, one running Terminator with htop and iotop,
one for Nautilus, one for Gedit, one for music (GNOME-mplayer currently),
one for OpenOffice, and sometimes a few more for the Gimp and a scratchpad
space for quick work using something else. I use ALT+1 etc to jump between
them.

What are the problems you see with workspaces? What kind of improvements do
you think are needed?

Anzan
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 22/04/10 04:27, Robin Anderson wrote:
> One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets
> into discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification
> area" / "(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put
> applications so they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual
> desktops even if they aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at
> least the past several releases, has only had two workspaces on by
> default so I take it there isn't much of a focus to get average users
> (read: users that don't change default settings) to use them, but they
> are quite useful and I'd go so far as to compare them to how a person
> feels after using a dual monitor setup for a little while compared to
> always using a single monitor.

It's a good point. The workspaces experience has languished, and I'd
like for us to climb in and improve it substantially. At the moment, we
do a half-hearted job - we ship what's there but as you say, only
configure two workspaces. I'd be inclined to say "ship without
workspaces" so that we are at least definitive about the position for
the moment.

I'd welcome a discussion about how we could make workspaces *great*. If
we can do that, then we would make more of them. And your contribution
above is a useful start: great workspaces give you easy access to some
apps regardless of the workspace you happen to be in.

Mark



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Dylan McCall]

Thanks for all the awesome explanations!

I left a question in the comments at design.canonical.com, and I have a
few other thoughts.

First of all, I think it would be worth investigating sound effects
attached to indicators. Doing it through the indicator applet means we
can (if desired) use Canberra's awesome ca_gtk_play_for_widget function
(which means beautiful positional audio).


Secondly, I think it's really important to explore the window list at
this point. As others have mentioned, this is all doing a nice job of
establishing what certain APIs are for and making sure they don't get
misused. However, we're lacking a replacement for one of the more
popular misuses: notification icons for minimization.

One thing that occurs to me is to change the window list into a more
physical place that you can move windows to. So, "minimized" windows
appear there, and are available there, no matter what workspace you're
on. It would no longer list windows unless they are minimized. Pretty
substantial change, but maybe I can do a mockup or something if anyone's
interested :)

Gnome-shell could be doing some useful stuff there, too.


I was a bit worried upon reading “And further, everything is becoming a
single set of menus.” I could be interpreting it wrong, but this sounds
like everything is going to be stuck in the same space at the top right
even though they are all neatly categorized. I think there should be
separation between these different categories of indicators in some
form. For example, substantial whitespace between app indicators
(including indicator-messages) and system-related indicators (battery,
session). Are we on the same page?


Thanks,
Dylan


PS: If the clock applet is intended to get arbitrary extensions from
different bits of PIM software to show appointments (not just Evolution
and not jammed in to the applet itself), that's something I've wanted
for a long time. Yay! I just hope it doesn't spell the death of the
world clock feature. If it does, I recommend being cautious; it may have
some very happy users :)


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Robin Anderson]

One important point I hope the design team is aware of and that gets into
discussions on this topic is that minimizing to the "notification area" /
"(not) system tray" is currently a very nice place to put applications so
they're accessible from all workspaces / virtual desktops even if they
aren't necessarily long-running. Ubuntu, for at least the past several
releases, has only had two workspaces on by default so I take it there isn't
much of a focus to get average users (read: users that don't change default
settings) to use them, but they are quite useful and I'd go so far as to
compare them to how a person feels after using a dual monitor setup for a
little while compared to always using a single monitor.

The post does mention "We will be working on ways for long-running
applications to be less obtrusive when their windows are minimized" which
made me think of how Chrome / Chromium uses pinned tabs and so now I'm
wondering if the design team or other Ubuntu developers eventually want to
have Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Ubuntu Desktop converge and maybe perhaps
have a Chrome-OS-like tab windowing setup. Personally, I'd very much like to
stick to a standard Window List for Desktop usage, but I would be curious
what the Design Team's plans are in this area.

One can set the option Always on Visible Workspace from the right click menu
on a window in the window list but directly against the statement "“I know,
let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”" from the blog
post, the usage of icons in the notification area is different in the major
*always on available workspace place* way. As the notification area gets
phased out, I would hope there's at least some thought put into a Gnome
applet (with D-Bus stuff for KDE and other DEs) for a place separate from
the Window List to minimize applications to be visible on all workspaces. Or
at least standards are kept so Gnome or another DE could be configured to
use current applications with the 'visible on all workspaces' minimizing
feature could be used (or re-enabled in the case of Ubuntu's Gnome).

Thanks for reading.
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 22:44, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> Do you have suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?
>

thank you for asking for our opinions ;)

after all u openly admit, conceptual mistakes did happen in the recent
past..
looks like Ubuntu can learn from mistakes. glad to see Ubuntu's confidence
and creative innovation unaffected!

conservative behaviour upstream is important, since that's where the
foundation all our houses stand upon is being maintained. imagine GNOME not
letting us know about 3.0's GNOME Shell until 1 month before release.. that
would be insane.

MPT: after reading your excellent article on the history of 90% of why there
is a panel in nearly every desktop, i agree fully: farewell to the
notification area ;)

all that has been said in this thread so far is reasonable imho.

all *i* would like to add now, is that i'm confident you guys already are
aware of most of these points, and that's what makes the planned changes so
valuable..
keep pioneering the desktop, just keep your community in the loop like you
hereby did!
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Frederik Nnaji]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 23:04, Shane Fagan  wrote:
>
> Hey mpt,
>
> I think the target is far enough but I wouldnt like to remove it from
> the default install until upstreams adopt the new spec fully. Which will
> take a long enough time. I think remove it cold turkey from the next LTS
> release just to give it fair warning to universe app
> developers/maintainers to patch their apps accordingly.

LTS sounds like an intelligent goal.
if things upstream happen to move along faster due to the evolutive
leaps in overall usability nowadays, earlier dates might become
possible as we go..
pioneering important ideas and implementing them is what Ubuntu is
known for, keep it up!

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jan Claeys]

Op woensdag 21-04-2010 om 16:57 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef Martin
Owens:
> So long as it doesn't kill off the character pallet that I use for
> printing ° and € :-) I'll be fine. 

You don't use "US International with AltGr dead keys" yet?


-- 
Jan Claeys


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jim Rorie]

I see where you are going, but I have a couple of concerns.

1) It's a given that many developers were using(abusing) the
notification area inappropriately.  However, I think you are viewing
part of this wrong.  Yes, there were a lot of indicators that weren't
notify anything. But they were shortcuts.  The NA morphed into a
shortcut area because it provided a unique level of functionality that
wasn't available anywhere else on the desktop.

A prominent example is that of the music player.  Short of having a
window open to get in your way, the NA icon gives you a way to control
the player with a minimum number of clicks and no window management
issues.  I fear that embedding a player in yet another level of
hierarchy is going reduce usability in the march to bring order to the
desktop.  

In short, what provisions have you made to provide the same short cut
functionality without introducing additional clicks?

2) I personally tweak the update notifier on all my machine (internal
and ones I build for others) to revert the old notification icon scheme.
It saves me a lot of trouble and questions, particularly with people
that are not particularly computer literate.  A lot of people do this.
It's a pretty popular mod.  

I have been silent on the update manager issue in the hopes that a sane
solution would present itself.  It hasn't.  Now you are forcing our
hand. So I submit.  What do you intend to do to resolve that fact that
the update manager pops down on the desktop like the old X-10 web ads
that we all utterly despised? :/


On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 21:44 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?
> 
\


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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> 1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
> of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
> example, is overwhelming. And I cannot really blame them in those
> cases. What should I say? "Well, it's obvious if you were subscribed
> in the Ayatana list, or saw these technical and developer-oriented
> specification wikis or saw this specific post of this developer's
> blog whose name you didn't even know until now..."
> 
> 2) Making easy to revert to the original behavior, at least until
> *full* feature-parity is reached. I'm not talking about a GUI, but
> recompilation should not be required. The main example of how this
> is currently lacking is Empathy. If the user does not like NotifyOSD,
> he can install notification-daemon. But if he does that, the heavily
> patched Ubuntu version of Empathy becomes broken. And because the end
> user has no obligation of knowing what came from Ubuntu patches, who
> also ends up suffering is upstream bug triagers, who have to deal with
> a lot of misdirected reports. This is creating a lot of bad blood and
> earning Ubuntu a very bad reputation among both upstream developers
> and end users.

In short: in think Ubuntu *can* and *should* dare to go to certain
directions even if it conflicts with everyone else, even if just for
the sake of experimenting. But conflicting should mean *offering an
option* and not trampling over upstream and forcing things on users.

Also, it should be made more clear that Ubuntu developers support
and encourage support for other applications, but just cannot work
on everything due to lack of manpower. Today, the Messaging Menu
is hated among 11 out of 10 Thunderbird users for obvious reasons.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User]

> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?

As a regular reader of Ubuntu Forums, I know for a fact that there are
two things in Ayatana that really need improving:

1) Communicating the goals and current status to end users. The amount
of people who think the messaging menu is only a launcher, for
example, is overwhelming. And I cannot really blame them in those
cases. What should I say? "Well, it's obvious if you were subscribed
in the Ayatana list, or saw these technical and developer-oriented
specification wikis or saw this specific post of this developer's
blog whose name you didn't even know until now..."

2) Making easy to revert to the original behavior, at least until
*full* feature-parity is reached. I'm not talking about a GUI, but
recompilation should not be required. The main example of how this
is currently lacking is Empathy. If the user does not like NotifyOSD,
he can install notification-daemon. But if he does that, the heavily
patched Ubuntu version of Empathy becomes broken. And because the end
user has no obligation of knowing what came from Ubuntu patches, who
also ends up suffering is upstream bug triagers, who have to deal with
a lot of misdirected reports. This is creating a lot of bad blood and
earning Ubuntu a very bad reputation among both upstream developers
and end users.



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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Shane Fagan]

Hey mpt,

I think the target is far enough but I wouldnt like to remove it from
the default install until upstreams adopt the new spec fully. Which will
take a long enough time. I think remove it cold turkey from the next LTS
release just to give it fair warning to universe app
developers/maintainers to patch their apps accordingly. 

-fagan

On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 21:44 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hi folks
> 
> On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our
> plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu
> by 11.04. 
> 
> Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too.
> 
> 
> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?
> 
> Thanks
> - -- 
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
> 
> iEYEARECAAYFAkvPY54ACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecq3sACdGAU4JvHlUtSaG/cmojKthtHw
> HlUAnjQ/1RMW7pN+WU9AAikQH2yligi3
> =+RNZ
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Jeremy Nickurak]

AFAIK, this is a major deviation from what upstream and other
distributions are doing, even larger than that of notify-osd.

Is there any sign of uptake of the indicator suite of protocols
upstream or in any other distributions? Why or why not? Gnome-shell
certainly seems to be going a different direction, and the
repurcussions of that have seen scarce discussion here..

If upstream and/or other distributions aren't on board with this,
what's the route for backwards-compatability, and interoperation with
other projects?

Any sign of the indicator suite of protocols seeing uptake at
somewhere vendor-neutral, like freedesktop.org?

I for one feel like this sort of decision is Canonical getting quite a
bit further ahead of itself, when there's a lot of unanswered
questions about tying this to the greater FOSS operating system
community.

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 14:44, Matthew Paul Thomas  wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi folks
>
> On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our
> plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu
> by 11.04. 
>
> Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too.
> 
>
> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?
>
> Thanks
> - --
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
>
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-- 
Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: jer...@nickurak.ca =-

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Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Martin Owens]

It's makes sense, the lack of options to move things around will concern
some in the design community who want to experiment.

So long as it doesn't kill off the character pallet that I use for
printing ° and € :-) I'll be fine.

Martin,

On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 21:44 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
> either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
> completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
> suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother? 


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[Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Hi folks

On the new Canonical Design site, we've just posted an overview of our
plan to retire the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray") from Ubuntu
by 11.04. 

Mark S. has posted an architectural overview on his site too.


Your feedback is welcome on this mailing list (or, if you prefer, on
either of those Web pages). Does the plan make sense? Or are we
completely off our rocker? Is there anything we've missed? Do you have
suggestions on how we can make the transition smoother?

Thanks
- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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