Comment 77 for bug 332945

(CC'ed to ubuntu-devel-discuss, as this is where further discussions
should happen. Please everybody answer there.)

Op zaterdag 28-03-2009 om 02:23 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Ted Gould:
> The notification area is fundamentally broken. It's broken in the
> fact that what it requires is applications to make a small X window,
> which then gets embedded into the panel. This means that the
> application must learn what the interface of what is around it is, and
> conform to that.
> There is no reasonable way for applications to learn how all the
> different panels work, and make custom behavior for all of them. What
> is better is if the applications export the data they want to appear
> there, and leave the rendering of that data to the panel itself. Then
> it will be consistent with the UI concepts that are being used.

I agree with that mostly, and I think most developers will agree with
this idea in principle. One important issue that people have been
complaining about is that you[*] removed some very important icons in
the notification area without providing an alternative.

No, the popup/popunder is not an alternative, because it's not
_persistent_ (it seems like you[*] don't understand this, because I
haven't seen a single answer to this complaint--except for "disable the
new behaviour of update-notifier completely").

What you[*] should have done is provide an alternative: exporting the
data so that something can display it, and provide at least a basic
"something" so that it actually gets shown. (Maybe it's possible to
include this in the new indicator-messages applet, I don't know.)

[*] not you personally of course, but the whole group of people involved
in this change

--
Jan Claeys