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

[Jeffrey S. Haemer]

We could have an Applet Blossom Festival, & let people show off their
favorite bloomin' applets.

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Neal McBurnett <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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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell], http://seejeffrun.blogspot.com [blog],
http://www.youtube.com/user/goyishekop [vlog]
*פרייהייט? דאס איז יאַנג דינען וואָרט.*
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