[lug] The deal with applets / notifications / panels / indicators / systray.....

[Matt Dew]

http://xkcd.com/927/

On 02/03/2012 03:19 PM, Bruce Long wrote:
> Here's my solution: http://infomage.com/home.html
>
> I'm making lots of progress. It's semi usable for hackers now (it's
> useful but you need to edit text files). My goal is to use it as my only
> platform. I'm currently working on having it use the screens of
> mac//linux/iPhone/Android/Windows computers as a single large monitor.
> Later, XBox, Playstation, Nook, etc.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us
> <mailto:neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>> wrote:
>
>     More and more the world of applets seems to be spinning out of
>     control.  I can't even keep up with or make sense of the various
>     terms for what I'm trying to talk about.
>
>     In the "good old days", real computers had plain text, and that was
>     fine.  Well, except for character sets, but I digress.
>
>     Then along came the GUI - graphical user interface - and the bumpy
>     ride commenced of how to deal with windows, applets, icons,
>     notifications, etc.  Yikes.
>
>     I've used a crazy mess of GUIs over the years.  Hell, I even
>     designed a crude Unix/32V bitmap font in 1977 for a Plato plasma
>     display.  I've used the Blit/DMD, plain old X11 widgets, Motif,
>     Sun's NeWS system and their other window managers, CDE, xinit, TWM,
>     FVWM, Sawmill, Gnome, KDE, Unity, etc.
>
>     I've also been excited about using byobu/screen/tmux for making all
>     the same sort of "gui" window/notification stuff available back on a
>     nice efficient remotable terminal interface.
>
>     The field is hard to even talk about, since everyone overloads
>     terms, assumes I know what Windows or Mac are doing and what they
>     call various parts of the screen, etc.
>
>     Now the big battle seems to be about using "little apps" like
>     weather report applets, workrave, hamster, etc.  The official
>     position from both Unity and Gnome 3 seems to be that there was too
>     much abuse of the designer's ability to make a left or right click
>     mean something unique for their applet, and that the chaos must
>     stop, so it all has to go.  But those are just my vague notions, and
>     I don't yet see a clear statement of what the designer or user is
>     supposed to do in order to make vital information visible to users,
>     and allow the user to conveniently control them.
>
>     Help!
>
>     Do I have this latest shift even remotely correct?
>
>     Is there a reasonable description of the issue somewhere?
>
>     Are people really converging on a good, principled
>     user-interface-design understanding of this stuff?
>
>     Does it appply to geeks and tinkerers?  So should I really drink the
>     kool-aid?  Or should I just resist and stick with gnome 2 or Ubuntu
>     Server with byobu or whatever?  (And don't tell me to run these
>     applets in the ----ing cloud, like some gmail/cloud9/orion-inspired
>     attack from beyond.)
>
>     Is there anyone that could do a nice broad, insightful LUG talk on
>     this topic?  Or even better a pair of folks from different camps so
>     we could have a food fight^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussion about it?
>
>     What would we even call it - The Great Applet Debate?
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     Neal McBurnett http://neal.mcburnett.org/
>     _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
>
> --
> Give me immortality or give me death!
>
>
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