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

[Neal McBurnett]

Thanks, Davide.  I at least got two on-topic responses ;)

This post by the Unity folks gives a good sense of the complicated history of the notification area, and why they felt a need to revamp the whole notion:

Farewell to the notification area  Canonical Design
 http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/

I still have sympathy for their argument, but also just want to be able to make my system work the way I want it to, and that includes the ability to designate a bit of information-packed real estate (on the panel) in which my favorite applets (note - no relation to the web-based notion of an "applet) can hang out and e.g. help me manage my tasks.

So let's have an "Applet Blossom Festival", and occupy the panel :)

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 03:24:22PM -0700, Davide Del Vento wrote:
> I would be very interested in a talk about this as well. There has
> been a (vaguely) related talk here:
> http://sea.ucar.edu/event/touch-and-go-leading-touch-ui-open-source
> (the video should appear there soon).
> As of myself, I would stick to gnome2 as long as I could. Which meant
> that I had to let it go months ago, with big pain that I'm still
> suffering. The less evil choice for me was KDE4. Just yesterday I
> spent more than 1 hour trying to have an external display working "as
> good as it did (out of the box, 1 minute effort) in gnome 2". Without
> complete success. Acceptable, but not perfect. Details next week, in
> the blog post I promised Bruce a couple of days ago.
> 
> Stick with gnome 2 until you can!
> 
> Bye,
> Davide
> 
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 15:08, 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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