From kde-core-devel Tue Feb 15 02:09:28 2005 From: Fred Schaettgen Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 02:09:28 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: thoughts on the systray Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=110845101629987 Olivier Goffart kde.org> writes: .. > > I know this. That's why I said this special part of the taskbar could be > > actually a separate applet, i.e. there'd be the "normal" taskbar and then > > there'd be the "systray" taskbar. There'd still be the other advantages of > > doing it the taskbar way instead of the current systray way. > > Can you explain the difference with that applet and the current taskbar ? > I agree that it is a great feature to allow every application to be placed in > the "systray" . but why can't we use the current systray for that ? You could, but the systray is less accessible than the taskbar and the taskbar has full control over everything. So it could zoom and fade icons, colorize them etc. I really like Lubos' idea of having several task bars with different looks plus custom menus for the tray items. If we had three trays - a regular one, one that shows only icons and one that can be folded to a single blue triangle - then it would look the same as today, but with a more accessible and consistent interface for the tray icons, no demand for adding a tray icon yet another application, more felxibility for the user and more possiblities to change the appearance of what looks like the tray then. The drawback is that it's slightly less flexible than the current tray icons, so a few tray icons whould have to become applets. For me this would look like that: Mixer -> Applet Keyboard layout -> Applet Klipper -> Taskbar Wallet -> Taskbar Bluetooth -> Taskbar Kopete -> Taskbar KMail -> Taskbar korgac -> Taskbar amarok -> Taskbar So most tray icons could in fact go to the taskbar - or one of them to be exact. If these different taskbars are all independant, there has to be a single instance which decides which window is displayed in which tray at first. Then it should be possible to drag windows from one tray to another one. So if a window annoys you, then you just take it and "move it to the right". Or move it to the windows-dumping-group which pops up when you hoover over the blue triangle which once belonged to KDE 3.4's system tray. The problem here is how to advertise the drag-and-drop functionality, because its absolutly not obvious (but it would be also nice to move applications to other desktops). But that's a general problem with drag and drop. Maybe it can be solved one day by highlighting each potential drop target if an item is drageed. So there should also be a RMB-submenu like the "To desktop"-menu to move a window to other taskbar. The resulting concept for users will be that every item in every taskbar corresponds to a window (maybe a notification message, maybe an application's main window), which is raised when they click it. And there is not difference between daemonlike programs and others. We don't know where to draw the line for this ourselves, so I don't see why there should be different places for programs that are some sort of daemon and those which are not. The difference has to be made by the user: Applications they want to work with and applications that should stay out of the way. .. > > There's no reason kicker applets couldn't do what systray icons can. > > That's what I meant with KPixmapPanelApplet. > > Ok. > But anyway, applet take currently the full height of my horizontal kicker. > while systray icons are by columns of two This can always be changed. And actually it would be good to have this changed no matter if we keep the system tray or not. Fred