OK, the subject it terrific, but it's sadly true. Let me start summarizing current behavior. The tracker-applet program perpetually display an icon in notification area. The users can: * click the icon to show a special "dialog" to enter search terms and to check current daemon status (indexing/paused/idle...) * right click to show a menu with additional actions (pause, search, statistics, preferences, quit) * look the icon to see if the daemon is indexing (the icon itself shows an animation when trackerd is indexing data)
What's wrong? Well a lot of stuff, reading HIG[1]: * from HIG "Using the status notification area applications can notify the user of non-critical events and expose the status of active system processes" * from HIG "Only core GNOME programs may perpetually display an icon in the status area" * from HIG "Non-core programs for which a perpetual icon may be useful must default to not perpetually showing the icon. Users may select to enable a perpetual icon for the application as a preference" * from HIG "write an applet instead of using notification area if clicking your notification area icon does anything other than opening a window directly associated with the icon" In general: "The utility of the notification area decreases rapidly when more than about four icons are always present. For this reason, icons that appear only temporarily in response to events are preferable." What's the issue? IMHO use tracker-applet for both notification of indexing status and quick hook to perform searches. So I think we should really remove from tracker-applet all stuff not related with the indexing status notification. Also the notification icon should be displayed (maybe animated) only when tracker is indexing and will need more then XX seconds (5? 10?) to complete the task. About interaction with the icon, I think that following actions/features could be good to have and will respect HIG: * Double-click or Space key on icon (default action): open a progress/status dialog, showing what tracker is currently indexing and statistics. * Right-click or Shift+F10 (show menu): show a menu with following entries: Indexing Status || Pause Indexing || Preferences (I think you don't need any other action to control the flow of the indexing) * MouseOver: show tooltip with current status[2] Finally: could we change the name to "tracker-status-icon"? Oh, if tracker/gnome users really like the idea on an icon on panel to quickly perform searches, then we should write a *real* applet and use it only to insert search terms. But please note that GNOME yet sips deskbar-applet for this task. PS jamie, do I've to open a bug on bugzilla? PPS I'll play with glade to design a good dialog for double-clic action [1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/desktop-notification-area.html [2] NOTE!! currently it seems to me that tracker-applet don't change the tooltip when indexing. Is it a bug? The message was available in translations... _______________________________________________ tracker-list mailing list tracker-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tracker-list