Indicator Applet: Why I like it
I know I tend to moan about a lot of things in my blog, sometimes I celebrate good work, well executed. Rarely do I get the opportunity to agree with the Ayatana/DX Ubuntu design direction. I may not agree with the group’s past choice of language communicating things to the community, but this is something I think it’s got mostly right.
OK so what don’t I like about the old notification area? Well it’s an arbitrary parent-widget, this means that it’s a container for other widgets which are not internally defined but are defined outside. This results is very inconsistent behaviour and a real problem when your trying to keep tabs on design as a distro.
For example in 10.04 I seem to have retained the notification area for the network manager, this looks out of place on the bar and doesn’t behave very nicely in a line, should someone come up with a more interesting way to show these things then all of these icons will have to be in the same system in a meta format that allows for bigger, stranger and even inconceivable future design.
Getting the system upstream…. that’s going to be the hard work considering the people involved. But I think it should go all the way to freedesktop.org as a real standard way of doing desktop indications.
That’s not to say I’m totally happy with everything; the irrational bias against tooltips is verging on comic and mindless. I haven’t seen any real rational against text based state indication (in what ever form it’s displayed). Removal of vital state information has to be based on something solid. Hopefully readable state will still be baked into the dbus service even if it’s rejected from this particular rendition.
Functional right click removal was contentious as well but at least that’s more sensible as it means the items operate under the same rules as every other gnome-panel widget. Alas not having a “Preferences” item in that list does make it an oddball. But then that’s another problem with the design team, you can have any options as long as they’re the welded presets, that’ll be worked on I’m sure.
So despite the rough communication, it is a surprisingly good move forwards in my view for the long term with a bit of time and a bit of community relations work it could prove a popular fork outside of Ubuntu.
Your thoughts?
Disclaimer: I didn’t really follow the debate about tool tips, so what I am going to say may be completely wrong/uninformed.
From my point of view, I don’t really see the big deal. I don’t see any situation where a toot tip give a vital information not conveyed by the icon. Someone mentioned the battery indicator, but seriously, I only need to know if my battery is full/mostly full/ mostly empty. I don’t care if it is 97% full or 93%, it won’t make me act any differently.
Same for most tool tips. As an user, I want my computer to do what I want him to do, and Lucid Lynx is quite good at that, I have a much more focused experience, it’s hard to tell how exactly, but I think that all those small details add up to a cohesive feeling.
So, I am quite happy with what Ayatana did so far. Can’t wait to see the future! (however, I understand that some people would like some details to be worked out in a different way, but you can’t make everything a preference)
ok, spent way too much time for this comment, gotta go. Cheers, and thanks for your blog, I always enjoy reading it.
Battery is probably the weakest reason so it’s no surprise you pick it out for scrutiny. Although the estimated time was hard to calculate, it gave people a false sense of hope and I think that’s a good thing.
As for the network manager or rythembox… that’s harder to tell, now I have two gnome icons for rythembox when it loaded, one is Music Applet and the other is the Indicator icon, it’s funny that I need another applet on the bar to indicate the song I’m playing because the indicator can’t do it any more without clicks.
I’m disappointed they decided not to use tooltips for system indicators in the Indicator Applet. I’ve gotten so use to getting information from them that it can be a little annoying not having them now. It actually makes things quite inconvenient. If I want to know how much is left of a song I am listening to using Rhythmbox, I have to click on the applet and show Rhythmbox to see it instead of getting it from a tooltip. Another example would be Transmission. I use to be able to hover over the icon to get the speeds of what I’m downloaded and uploading, but now I have to show Transmission to do that. It doesn’t really make much sense to me.
I like the idea of the IA and the messaging menu in theory, but in practice they are slowing me down. It’s now harder to respond to IM’s and I fear for the future of music applets. I’m afraid that the network manager applet will not be a good fit when it is inserted in IA.
The UX team has a lot of enthusiasm and skill, but they really shouldn’t be working on these ideas before fleshing them out further and performing actual usability testing. And that testing shouldn’t involve die hard mac users and canonical employees.
Sadly, the UX team is the reason that I’m losing interest in Ubuntu. Every press release from Mark alienates me further.
I agree that a tooltip is nice for Rhythmbox.
Personally, I really like the indicators for the convergence factor: GNOME tray icons now work the same way as KDE tray icons, so the world is a better place for everyone. Because of Phonon packaging issues, Amarok cannot play some of my music correctly, so I use Rhythmbox under KDE. Having a Rhythmbox tray icon that doesn’t act out of place is really nice.
For me the notification area was basically for programs that you use but for now they are left on the side (or i believe it should be ) but there are a lot of things that aren`t ment to be there: network applet ,volume applet
and the indicator could be for system wide things .
Now is rhythmbox part of the system or is it just a program that we usually start playing and put it aside in the notification area ? are the messages in the messangin applet part of the system ?
The fact that all this are blended together kept me so far to upgrade to lucid but i will tomorrow
although i`m not really happy 
There are certainly things I agree with about the project: the system tray has always felt like a dumping ground to me. Some things may belong there, sure, but an awful lot gets put in there that shouldn’t be. The result is, obviously, wasted space on the panel for stuff that isn’t really that important to keep there.
I also think that, while we’re working on this nightmare that is the system tray, it would make sense to make other changes: putting E-mails and chat together in one icon makes a great deal of sense, though I’m on the fence about putting microblogging there: in KDE, I have the microblogging widget in the panel so I can quickly see when new updates come in and view them without leaving my current task; clicking on the combined icon, on the Microblogging option, then on the now-flashing taskbar entry to focus on a dedicated application and to remove me near-completely from my current task seems a disproportionate amount of work for doing what twitter is supposed to do. Anyway. It also makes sense for music players to share an icon, rather than having 2 or 3 different icons with different menu paradigms in the panel.
Most of my gripe is with implementation details: all right, you took away contextual actions from notifications – I can live with that. But why, oh why, when someone sends me an instant message, does clicking on that person in the messaging menu make that window ask for attention instead of just switching to that workspace, bringing the window to the front and focussing it? Why do I have to click on the flashing taskbar entry to do what, logically, the menu option should do? The same thing happens with E-mails and the music palyers: it doesn’t switch to them, it just makes them flash in the taskbar.
The lack of information displayed does also get to me in some cases: I can hear a chorus, but is it the first or the last? I’d have to show the window to get that information (as shown above, a rather tedious process all on its own), even though I don’t plan on interacting with the application in any way.
All in all, I think that the general direction of Canonical’s Ayatana project is good; the things that I dislike feel more like bugs than deliberate implementation details.