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

[Neal McBurnett]

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/