Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. “system tray”), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification mechanisms instead. Some notification area items will be replaced by various system status menus we’re introducing. For a few programs, it will be appropriate to use custom status menus.
Why we’re doing this
This story begins in 1990, when Microsoft released Windows 3.0 without an easy way to see what time it was.
There was a Clock application in Windows, and it could float on top of all other windows, but setting that option wasn’t obvious. And when the Clock was minimized, its icon showed the current time, but usually that icon was covered by the Program Manager window and any other maximized windows.
Microsoft fixed this during the design of Windows 95 by embedding a clock in the new taskbar. They also realized that people wanted a quick way of changing the system volume, so they placed a speaker control next to the clock. Then for people using notebook computers, they added a battery meter and PCMCIA status as well.
Together, these elements were controlled by a program called systray.exe. But at some point, Microsoft decided to make this mechanism generic, so that any application could use it. And so was born something called the notification area.
Eventually geeks discovered the systray.exe name and started calling the notification area the “system tray”. Microsoft has been struggling for 15 years now to get people to call it the “notification area” instead, and largely failing.
In the first versions of Gnome, there was no notification area (though, infamously, there were five separate clocks). Building on a “status dock” in Gnome 1.4, Gnome 2.0 introduced the status notification area, again with strict instructions to use it only for notifications — only to find that people kept calling it the “system tray” here too.
I think there are two basic reasons people keep using this name. The first is that the notification area has always been used for things that aren’t notifications. The first two items in the Windows implementation, clock and volume, were never “notifications” in any meaningful sense. And in Gnome there’s a technical distinction between “panel applets” (such as the clock and volume) and the notification area itself, but visually, that distinction barely exists.
The second reason is that the notification area isn’t actually good at delivering notifications. A tiny square icon, taking up less than 0.1 percent of a typical display, can communicate extremely simple, ignorable things — like “you have new messages” or “your battery is charging”. But any information more abstract than that, such as “software updates are available for this computer”, is a non-starter. This became clear when Windows 2000 introduced notification balloons that point at particular icons, explaining what they mean. These balloons have their own problems: in particular, they float on top of every other window regardless of whether you need to pay attention to them right now. (For that reason, we replaced Gnome’s equivalent notification balloons with Notify OSD bubbles that you can click straight through if you want to.)
The situation is made worse by developers who feel the urge to add a notification area icon for their application just because they can. In Ubuntu, many programs — Rhythmbox, Banshee, VLC, Pino, and Pidgin, to name just five — put items in the notification area that aren’t notifications at all.
Often this is a substitute for minimizing the window, to avoid cluttering the taskbar. For example VLC’s notification area has a menu with a “Hide VLC media player in taskbar” item, and the AllTray utility exists for people who want “to have a program always running, but easy to put out of the way”. That may make perfect sense to the developers of those individual applications. But looking at the operating system as a whole, it’s crazy. No competent designer, sitting down to design an operating system from scratch, would say to themselves “I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”.
Microsoft, to their credit, have tried to rein in this kind of misuse of the notification area in Windows. But combined with their devotion to backward compatibility, that has caused its own problems. Windows XP hid persistent notification area items by default, and therefore also had a button for revealing them just in case you needed to access them. And in Windows Vista and 7, there is an entire dialog devoted to toggling which notification area icons should be hidden. It’s the OS equivalent of a car dealer including, with every car, a free roll of masking tape so you can cover up unwanted warning lights on the dashboard.
Meanwhile, there’s another problem with the notification area: inconsistent behavior. On Windows, in theory, a left single-click is supposed to “display whatever users most likely want to see”, a right-click is supposed to display a context menu, and a left double-click is supposed to either “Perform the default command on the context menu” or “perform the same action as a left single-click”. In practice, icons have a huge variety of behaviors, with the only common element being a context menu on right-click — to the point where some users have forgotten that they could ever left-click on the icons.
In Gnome, the same kind of hyper-flexibility is baked into the System Tray Protocol: items embedded in the notification area can do pretty much anything they like. So we’ve inherited the same problem as Windows: some items open a menu on left click, some open a menu on right click, some do both, some open a window, and at least one reliably disappears when you click it. It’s hopelessly inconsistent — and as long as we continue with the current protocol, it always will be inconsistent.
We can’t go on like this.
Nuke the entire site from orbit — it’s the only way to be sure
We took our first small step towards getting rid of the notification area in Ubuntu 9.04, when we stopped trying to use it to notify people of software upates, and instead just opened the updates window. Our reasoning was that a tiny icon couldn’t possibly do a good job of conveying something bureaucratic like the availability of new versions of software. (We still have work to do to simplify and streamline the presentation of updates, and we’d be glad to have help with that.)
In Ubuntu 9.10, we introduced the messaging menu, which replaced the various notification area items from messaging applications (Empathy, Evolution, Gwibber, and so on). We also introduced the session menu, which replaced both the user account switching menu (fast-user-switch-applet) and the big red button that had previously opened the shutdown dialog.
In Ubuntu 10.04, we’ve introduced the sound menu, which replaces the Gnome volume applet; and the “me” menu, which replaces the items for setting your status in various instant messaging programs.
In Ubuntu 10.10, we plan to introduce a power menu, which replaces the Gnome Power Manager applet; a network menu, which replaces the Network Manager applet (nm-applet); and a clock menu, or time and date menu, that replaces the Gnome clock applet. We’ll also be extending the sound menu, to replace the notification area items for music players. We will be posting more about these and other menus, and asking for feedback on our designs, in the coming weeks.
The pattern here is that everything is becoming a menu. And further, everything is becoming a single set of menus. You can see glimmerings of this in Ubuntu 10.04: for example, if you click on the messaging menu by mistake instead of the sound menu, you can just slide straight over to the sound menu without having to click again. (Currently, this is implemented using two panel applets, indicator-applet and indicator-applet-session. We’ll be consolidating this in future Ubuntu versions.)
Our roadmap is that in Ubuntu 11.04, one year from now, there will be no notification area. And in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, we’ll remove it even earlier, in 10.10. So if you develop an application that uses the notification area, and you want the millions of Ubuntu users to be able to use it, now is the time to change it.
What applications should do instead
Many programs should not have an item in the panel at all. Where a notification area icon was being used mainly as a substitute for minimizing, the window should just minimize instead. We will be working on ways for long-running applications to be less obtrusive when their windows are minimized.
Some applications should integrate into one of the menus that aggregate a particular category of items. An e-mail, instant messaging, feed reading, or similar applications should integrate into the messaging menu. An instant messaging client should respond to status changes in the “me” menu. And a music player should integrate into the sound menu. We’ll provide tutorials and example code for each of these things, as we finalize designs for each menu.
In a few cases, it makes sense for an application to use its own custom status menu. Some applications do this already in Ubuntu 10.04, and we’ll be extending this “application indicator” mechanism in Ubuntu 10.10. The application indicator protocol uses D-Bus, which means that the menu a program publishes looks native whether it’s running in Gnome (appearing in the Gnome panel) or in KDE (in the KDE system tray). Once the API stabilizes in a year or two, we’ll propose it for inclusion in those environments.
We welcome your feedback on these plans, either on this post directly, or on the Ayatana mailing list.
Our colleagues in Canonical’s desktop experience team have worked extremely hard over the past year in implementing these menus and APIs, and we are grateful to them. This is not revolutionary work, but it is important. When we’re done, we will have fixed an annoyance that has existed since years before Ubuntu began.
Try to be faster than Apple ;)
>you can just slide straight over to the sound menu without having to click again
I’m on a Mac now. Using Snow Leo. I can click at the AirPort (WiFi) icon and slide over other Apple icons — Time Machine, eject, Bluetooth, volume, language, etc.
But I can’t slide over 3rd-party app icons.
>Once the API stabilizes in a year or two, we’ll propose it
Oh, so slow.
Interesting.
I hope all BitTorrent clients, P2P apps, and just plain downloading apps can go together in a common downloads menu.
But what about Windows apps running in Wine? Some of them actually minimizes to the notification area when you click on the x, and you have to rigth click the notification area icon to close it (like Spotify).
I’m also conserned about apps that you want to have running in the background, but not minimized so it shows up in the Alt+Tab all the time, especially Wine apps.
unbelievable
“if you click on the messaging menu by mistake instead of the sound menu, you can just slide straight over to the sound menu without having to click again.”
Sounds good in theory but I find that if I click on the sound menu then run the cursor up to a selection I often run sideways as well then the next menu or the one after that offers an option.
By the time I have ‘slid’ back to the sound menu options I often go too far thus getting another menu.
Too many menus too close together making for navigation hell.
If this is going to be implemented then think of the less-abled and elderly without the fine motor control that would be needed for this implementation.
Include an overarching option to ‘show one menu only per click’ to allow sensible navigation for those of us non-texting, non-gaming, artritic and just plain slow.
Nuke the whole thing from orbit!
That’s the way to do it, piss off tons of developers, break their applications on Ubuntu, and push users who really require certain aps in the tray toward another OS. I suggest the clear way to deal with this is via standards. You know, those folks over at freedesktop.org.
This surely sounds interesting. But: Do you coordinate anything of that with upstream? Also I don’t quite see how that would fit in the GNOME Shell / GNOME 3.0 world. Or do you plan to stay with the classic panel instead?
MyFreeWeb: Canonical has many, many fewer designers and engineers than Apple does. The more help we get, the faster we can improve. ;-)
Børge: Thanks for reminding us about the Wine issue (though I’m sure Scott Ritchie, the Wine maintainer, would have reminded us at UDS next month). It might be useful to research how Parallels and VMWare Fusion handle the Windows notification area.
bob: Yes, I know the problem you’re talking about. It has long been solved in GTK for submenus — you can usually drag diagonally off a submenu title towards an item near the bottom of the submenu, without triggering one of the other top-level items. We just need to apply that same submenu logic to menu titles.
Wert: You’re right, this would make a lot of sense as an XDG specification. But we need to implement it first to demonstrate that it’s feasible. “Standards” without implementations are useless.
Wert,
The KDE people have proposed this spec to fdo and we’ve proposed it to GNOME. I don’t see where this “breaks their applications” since it has a fallback mechanism.
@Wert:
You mean, like this: http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/
I’ve got to echo suka’s thoughts about upstream and gnome-shell.
Beyond that, though I’m sure it goes without saying given Canonical’s commitment to accessibility, please test your new design thoroughly so that users of ATs can enjoy the new experience as much as everyone else.
I was wondering why on lucid it’s easier to handle rhythmbox from the panel icon. Of course, it has a menu now. At first it was hard to get used to the right click doing nothing on the icon, but now I find it really useful.
And what’s the plan for the applications that are “minimized to the tray” instead of being closed when you click on the CLOSE button. For me it is a bad design error that when I click the red X, the application just disappears from sight.
Thanks for the awesome post, MPT.
Aside from my earlier musings on UI that affects too many places at once (on the mailing list), one thing I’m worried about is scalability. Is this design moving towards having, instead of an indicator for each service (as in Rhythmbox’s and Transmission’s indicators), a few generic meta-indicators that collect information from other applications? (Eg: indicator-messages for every category an indicator could possibly need to fill).
If so, what happens in the future as major categories of background functionality are created, perhaps that aren’t provided for by default? How can we avoid having a million different, conflicting attempts at generic geolocation meta-indicators where each geolocation service talks to a different one?
In addition, will there be a consistent API for adding things to these meta-indicators like the power indicator, or does each one risk doing things its own way? Will a service that adds to indicator-power rely on its existence, or will it gracefully fall back to creating a top level indicator?
Leo, but what does the “red X” mean?
“Activity termination” or “get this window out of my sight”?
How do you choose to draw a consistent line between the two?
Why?
Good post.
Are there any plans on what to do with the window list? If applications can’t minimize to the tray anymore, they take up a lot of space on the taskbar. On Windows 7 and OS X they use big icons without text (which can of course be emulated easily, with DockbarX or a dock app, but that’s not really the point).
Do you want to keep the text on the taskbar? Are there any plans to adjust this part of the taskbar? Or should applications that are constantly running move to one of those system status menus?
Thanks and keep up the great work. Looking forward to Lucid. :)
So, instead of the typical “left-click” to un-hide ive got to go via the menu each time a la Transmission.
Absolute genius of a unnecessary idea.
I posted a message on ubuntu-devel-discuss a few weeks ago that is somewhat related to this. How do you feel about the ‘X’ window control for “closing a window” but leaving the application running (either in the notification area or in an indicator applet)? I’ve read the responses, and I understand both sides of the argument (I think). The behavior still seems counter-intuitive to me. Do you have any ideas of how this could be improved in the workflow you’re proposing here? Or do you have any thoughts on this “problem” (as I see it) in general?
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2010-April/011107.html
I see now that others have brought up my issue :)
I just hope application indicators gets smarter and more capable. I can’t imagine controlling music player without scroll-to-change-song or having a menu for that task! :)
@Jeff:
That what virtual desktops are for. But new users don’t use virtual desktop because they think it’s complicated or don’t even know about it. There should be an easy way to explain about that and encourage users to use virtual desktops.
I hope ubuntu manual is covering that.
The notification area is one of the few freedesktop.org standards that are really used, and work on any desktop environment. Any app tray icon would work on gnome, kde, xfce, tint2, stalonetray…. I agree it is over-used by apps, but it should just be properly used, not to be ditched. The “indicator applets” just do the same thing, and will be over-used (read: “ineffective” and “inconsistent”) on the future.
There is a lot of great potential here but I think that hover to show information is essential e.g. banshee’s current tray app uses this well.
+1 to what Suka said.
I really find this ‘notification area removal’ pretty exciting. It’s only drawback would be that *everything* would be a menu and I *hate* the messaging indicator thingy, because I mainly use only empathy and it makes me have to click multiple times, so I usually just remove it first thing.
Anyway, this article makes a lot of sense… it’s so stupid to have the task bar and yet again have the “system tray” with same apps overall but just icons, it’s like the same crap twice but not quite.
This is one thing I appreciate Apple / Mac OS X, as well as windows7: trying to erase the line between shortcuts/launchers/tray/running applications, by somewhat making a dock.
Anyway, keep in mind Gnome Shell / Gnome 3 as well, eventually influence it.
“It has long been solved in GTK for submenus — you can usually drag diagonally off a submenu title towards an item near the bottom of the submenu, without triggering one of the other top-level items.”
I take it this refers to behavior such as how the’applications.places.system’ menus work ?.
If the menus you are proposing would work like that then well done.
As it stands in Lucid I find their operation to be frustrating and a backward step.
And don’t even get me started on having to click on a menu to access and adjust something as simple as volume.
Pre-Lucid the hover and scroll-wheel approach just seemed so right.
Now with Lucid I need two extra actions to adjust volume.
That sort of ‘improvement’ is just not right nor does it ‘reduce clutter’ it only hides it in layers of extraneous actions.
Make sure you give the network control of bittorrent apps and other download managers, if you plan on doing this. If you don’t want a gui editor, at least make it changable with gconf, otherwise it’s a real pain. There are apps like tomboy that are sooo needed in the tray; I hope you can implement jumplists so if it’s not there, we can at least sill access features as a right-click.
Sounds interesting! I look forward to seeing the new changes :)
@Samium Gromoff, I think that a consistent line between the two should be drawn, because they are different actions. If you have 4 actions and 3 controls, problems will arise. And you will get frustrated users like me that can’t predict if the application is going to shut or hide, because they behave inconsistently.
Anyway, if the “get this window out of my sight” action is needed and it’s not possible to add an extra button for it, I would set it on the minimize control, and not on the red X. Then, if the application decides to minimize to the tray instead of to the windows list, I don’t know who gave it permission to do so but it seems a little more intuitive.
This is slightly unrelated to the theme of the post. I’ll read the thread started by Jonathan Blackhall and add my impressions there.
Hey, look, the design team are giving us something different and explaining their reasoning!
Fantastic! Good work guys.
yuss, GNOME Shell could get tricky to manage with this, but it could become a nice marriage, too!
looking forward to first tests on my box :D
I’d like something like a “monitoring area” or panel, which includes several items of information:
1. notify-osd past messages. Right now, I’m running 9.04, planning to install 10.04 in the next couple of days, but AFA Karmic (in a VBox VM) is concerned, if I step away from the comp for a few mins, I miss any OSD notifications that might have popped up. There probably is a way to view past notifications (?) but I haven’t found it yet.
2. Trifurcation of notifications into ‘urgency levels’. Critical/security updates should be up and ‘in your face’. Less urgent updates – not. Apps that are just being chatty… can go into the third level. I’d like each level to have its own area in the monitoring area (described below).
3. Running system information that is useful to even new users, and can be customized/added to by power users. For new users, default could be something like simple CPU meters, a memory & swap meter, a network meter, battery meter, temperature monitors (most hardware now has the sensors, but it’s usually a manual effort to get them set up to monitor).
4. Mail/social network updates (icons, or maybe even photos of user’s contacts that are issuing status updates/whatever). This would include monitoring Evo or Thunderbird for new mail messages (yeah, some of us old-fashioned people prefer email.. sighh)
How would the monitoring area look? Well, call me old-hat if you will, but I really like gkrellm, and tend to set it up first thing after a new install. Widescreen monitors are becoming common; the docked gkrellm window probably won’t annoy people. Gkrellm displays much of the information above, as well as date/time, proc, uptime and HDD activity (by my config).
So something like gkrellm, with the trifurcated notification areas added at or near the top, docked to a vertical edge of the screen, themed to blend with the current Ubuntu theme, and eyecandy like transparency/shadows etc by Compiz, when it’s enabled. The larger unit areas in such a setup would afford a lot more screen area for urgent notifications — a 90x50px (approx, measured with screen ruler) unit of the monitor area flashing orange or red (critical level notification) would get way more user attention than the little icon in the old notification area. This scheme also exposes a lot more useful information to users. Of course, the appearance needs a makeover… for example, new users should see a “network” icon in the network display unit, not a label saying “eth0″ :-/
Naturally, in contrast to gkrellm, mouse interaction with this area should be useful :-/ Hovering the pointer above a unit should display useful info: CPU meter: tooltip with `top` 3 or 5 processes hogging CPU; disk meter: likewise; social/email units: summary info of the communication – who from, subject line or truncated message text. Left-click on a unit should launch/show an app that handles that particular type of info — system monitor/email client/IM client etc.
I’ll leave double-clicks, right-clicks, middle-clicks etc to the interaction gurus – I just had to get this idea off my chest because it’s something I would really like.
Can we please get a messaging-menu icon that doesn’t look like “You’ve got mail!” ?
For those of us who used Eudora, back in the day will notice that the icons are almost identical and I believe this is a valid use-case. An empty mailbox (until needed) with a sing up when we have a message would be fine, or a black envelope. Just not a gray or a white envelope – it’s WAY too distracting.
Otherwise, solid design choices, imo.
I’ve written a couple of Java applications that sit in the “system tray”:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wrldtimesystray
http://sourceforge.net/projects/stardatesystray
Each essentially sits as an icon in the tray area and display information either during a hover or single left click. A menu also pops up during a right click (which can kick off different functions).
How would such applications fit into this new paradigm as I don’t believe Java integrates directly with Gnome/KDE?
Well researched and written up as usual. Thank you for working on this and making our systems a little bit less black magic.
I truly hope that Gnome and particularly KDE can resist to this change, because of its complete lack of flexibility. If I read correctly:
1) indicators must go to the top right of the screen no possibility to change it.
2) indicators must be in a fixed order, no possibility to change it.
3) once indicators are in place, all applications using the system tray must be modified to work with indicators.
If Gnome and KDE accept this, margin for other distros to take different paths will be minimal and Ubuntu will actually end up imposing its choices on everybody. As a matter of fact there is already a push to do so by telling developers that they must stop relying on the system tray applets even before Gnome and KDE can take any decision about that.
A first point against the current suggestion for indicators is that on screens that are much wider than tall, to put things both on the top and the bottom of the screen is a very poor design choice. The gnome idea of having two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom of the screen was nice on the 4X3 screens that were used a few years ago, and can be nice today on phone screens that have a vertical form factor, but is not ok for the “panoramic” screens that computers and laptops get today.
Recently I always reconfigure gnome to use a single panel a la KDE, otherwise on 1024X600 screens there is not enough estate to vertically display anything. To have 2 20-pixel thick panels is to steal from applications 7% of your vertical space and screen area.
A second point is that maybe the reason why the “system tray” paradigm has sticked and the “notification area” has not is that people do not want a notification area. Maybe they exactly want a “system tray”, namely a single place to quickly check and access system or hardware related applications that typically live for the same amount of time as the session itself. It is not a substitute for minimization nor an inconsistent way to hide windows: such applications are not started as a window and then actively minimized or hidden. They are set up to start automatically and readily in the system tray form, something that is completely different from the very beginning. And no… the possibility to conceal things in the tray is not like “masking tape so you can cover up unwanted warning lights”. It is much more like the toolbox paradigm. Ideally one would like to have a toolbox with an infinitely wide opening, so that when you open it you can see all the tools. But the opening is limited in size, so what do you do? You put the tools that you use less on the bottom of the toolbox, so the ones you use more can be visible at the top.
Finally note that the main argument made against the system tray is that programmers have too much freedom to make the many applets inconsistent. Unfortunately, by the same lines one could say that the desktop must go because programmers have too much freedom to make the many applications inconsistent.
sorry, but your notification area looks bad, because you made it in that way. why do you use date, and weather there? just remove it. another thing is using empathy in that way – just waisting space, especialy if you are using pidgin. just remove all of that rubbish, and it will be usable.
look like this screenshot was made on purpose. I have no problem with notification area. please don’t repair something, that is not broken. like you changed buttons from right, to left.
I don’t use any of the indicator applets in ubuntu – for me they are useless implementation of something already implemented.
Why have another background application running and wasting memory just to show me the indicator-applet-session menu, when I can do the same actions via several .desktop files or the “System” menu?
Why dumping the “system tray”, when it was around for many years and there are a lot of users (and developers) who are familiar with it?
Just because your design team thinks this is logical, does not mean it really is.
Maybe it’s time for me to switch to another distro.
I feel more and more annoyed by ubuntu developers, especially since 9.10.
Some mockups of what you’re describing would be really nice…
I really hate the idea of notifying for updates. Chrome OS threatens to do transparent updates. Hallelujah.
Good riddance to annoying notifications. DND for me.
I like innovations. When I see them. But honestly, is there any here? What you’re trying to implement, in my humble view, is already there. It has always been, but with a different name: it’s called “Applications”. And, surprisingly, it’s already a menu.
You may argue you’re trying to move that menu from left to right (recalls painful memories of buttons moving around), and turn it into a new notification system organised in categories unfolded along the panel length. But, the Applications menu is already organised in a clean list of categories, isn’t it? Ultimately, if “the pattern here is that everything is becoming a menu”, and “further, everything is becoming a single set of menus”, then, further still, we might also be justified to expect even a single category button that, located entirely on the right, sits there as the final container for all the set of menus/pre-ordered categories. That would be actually nice, wouldn’t it? Well, surprise-surprise, it already exists, it sits on the left, and is called “Applications” menu.
So, instead of just “being different” for the hell of it, why not trying to improve on something that has always been there and which users are accustomed too? Following your original intentions, for instance, you could implement everything you envisioned directly in the Applications menu, let it flash in the same fashion minimised windows in the task bar do when they call for attention, and when you click on it, then the category will flash and so on, until you reach the app notifying you. Applications running may be indicated in bold, or by the “play” symbol next to them, while others could just stay there greyed out.
I don’t know, it may not be the brightest idea, but the pattern I see here is replicating uselessly features satisfactorily employed by users for years. If programmes can be started directly from their dedicated indicators, why would anyone be bothered to use the “old-fashion” menu? What will be the purpose of the Applications menu, then? Just to use your own words, will you “nuke the entire site from orbit” again, just because it’s the only way to be sure?
i think it´s really usefull for thing like instant messaging programs,it would be annoying to have it on the taskbar, unless there were no titles in the task bar
This is a direct copy of my Ubuntu Forums post.
I like what they’re doing with all the new menus, but they seem to be threatening to get rid of the systray altogether and break thousands of working, useful applications! This is a very heavy-handed, Apple-like move and I had honestly come to expect better from them. I certainly hope I’m not understanding them correctly. It’s true that if anyone comes up with an alternative to the systray, I will be the first in line. But any solution *must* have some kind of legacy support for old programs and protocols.
This is not like system software, such as X servers, drivers, and kernels. When you are dealing with non-system software, i.e. applications, compatibility becomes important. I know that the systray is visually offensive and could probably use some depreciation, but you need to be realistic. For example, I hate the Tk look-and-feel as much as the next guy, but I still keep it installed because I use programs that need it. And I still write code for it because it is *the* cross-platform toolkit for Python.
As far as notifications go, Notify-OSD was a good effort but it’s really not an improvement. It really is just as annoying as it looks at first. I’ve never really learned to like it. One of my programming projects in the future will be a dummy daemon which implements the freedesktop notification protocol but, by default, sends everything to the bit-bucket. It will also be configurable so you can have totally customized actions and methods of display, via shell scripts. Personally, I think this is going to be the best way to do this kind of thing.
Finally, I hope Notify-OSD and these new menus will be developed separately from Ubuntu itself, and effort should be made to reach out to packagers for other distros.
I actually like this, I’m not a fan at all of the system tray abuse that’s currently happening, but unfortunately for a lot of apps it’s the only way to quickly control some actions.
I am having trouble understanding how all app functionality can fit into these predefined containers. For example I use exaile music player, it closes to the notification area, and when I right-click the icon it shows me a nice menu that includes the standard music player actions (play, pause, etc.) – but also a nifty little utility that allows me to rate the current playing song on 5 stars without having to open the full program. It’s one of the main reasons I chose exaile over other media players.
Will apps be able to innovate like this using the new system? If not, you would effectively be eliminating a very important source of value and differentiation. These applets are very much part of the main interfaces and functionality of all apps. It would be akin to forcing all media player applications to fit into a new MusicAppShell where the library MUST be on the left, the player control MUST must provide a library saying that we no longer want media player apps to use all these “inconsistent” interfaces with progress bars in different places, different library management and so on.
Oops, submitted by accident, the last line should instead read:
It would be akin to saying “we hate the inconsistency between how media player apps are laid out, from now on, all media apps will have to fit into our new ‘Music Shell’ interface with the library on the left, the player on the bottom…”
If these were provided as optional applets that apps can code to, that could be great. People and developers will naturally gravitate towards them, because, seemingly, they add value. But others who don’t want to, don’t need to, or have good reason not to, should still have the choice to be pigeon-holed into it.
I have an idea for apps to be properly hidden without taking much space on the taskbar, and a pretty simple way to be implemented. Why not add a right click action to the “close” button, just like the maximize button has now, to have a different behavior when pressed. This way, if you want to “tray” your app, right click on the close button, and it will go at the beggining of the taskbar as an icon only. This way, you can have apps with different level of visibility. When you need apps in the taskbar to be fast and easily visible, minimize it, with the normal behavior and representation we have now. If you just want it to be there for a long while, but don’t really need to click it a lot, “right-close” it, to “iconify” it.
Just my 2 cents
A comment regarding:
“Where a notification area icon was being used mainly as a substitute for minimizing, the window should just minimize instead.”
As you say yourself, OS’s basically started out this way, and throughout the years, people realized that it makes more sense for some stuff to be tucked away – who are you to say they are wrong? I HATE, for example, that on my Win7 desktop I can’t minimize media player to the tray. It doesn’t belong in the task bar FOR ME. I am not saying people who like i in the task bar are wrong, just that it is a completely subjective call, and therefore the choice should be there to do either. A “messy” systray to you, can be considered perfectly organized by someone else.
Lelamal: Your approach actually seems pretty interesting. The only grip I see is lurking around the menu to find the notifying app. I would add a “zone” to the app menu with, when needed, would show the needed app. Anyway, I don’t see notifications that necessary at all, as the taskbar normally notifies me when something needs attention. I think this problem is originated from apps minimized to the systray, but then, I’ve already apported my thoughts about that in my previous post.
Strange. The only notification icons I have that I didn’t explicitly ask for are ones baked into core Ubuntu functionality: volume, network manager, and ibus. These are also the only ones I CAN’T REMOVE.
The others are:
compiz-icon, which I use when playing games
pidgin, which I like for the status and hiding the buddy list
whatpulse, which just flickers as I type and glows when it updates
gnome-do, which I only have around in case my WM crashes and I can’t otherwise run anything
parcellite, which I rarely use but which is only useful via icon
All of these things have useful menu functionality for me.
Also, minimizing windows when I have multiple desktops means that now I either need a “home” desktop for all these windows, or to have them appear on every desktop. Awesome.
There’s a lot of blame-spreading and UI disruption going on here when, at least on my screen, Ubuntu itself is the only thing causing a problem.
Incidentally: this may have been suggested already, but I’d rather see (a) all systray icon menus to just be part of the window menu and (b) the window manager let me condemn whatever app or window I want to the tray.
Guys, april 1st was 20 days ago!
bob: The scroll wheel should already work over the sound menu title. (Unfortunately it currently doesn’t work when the menu is open, just when it’s closed.)
caleb: Tomboy should work fine with a custom status menu, once we implement something to handle its pinning feature.
Ed S: Thanks for the detailed thoughts. However they’re probably too detailed, in the sense that they’d make the interface over-complex. If it’s important for someone to be notified of something that happened while they were away from the computer, that thing shouldn’t use a notification bubble, it should use some other mechanism. And conversely if a notification isn’t interesting enough to show in a bubble even when the user is paying attention, it should use some other mechanism too. What that mechanism should look like depends heavily on the particular application.
Bernmeister: Good question about Java. I guess that problem is equivalent to the Wine problem, in that a Java developer may not even have any clue what Ubuntu is, let alone be targeting it. So we’d probably solve it in the same way as for Wine.
tricqster: It wasn’t us who made that screenshot (it was Colin Dean), and it wasn’t us who decided to move the buttons (it was Mark Shuttleworth).
lokster: I have described in detail the reasons for “dumping the system tray” here: http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/ That something is old does not necessarily mean it makes any sense.
lelamal: I think hiding the clock in the Applications menu, for example, would be pretty annoying when you wanted to know what time it was.
Eevee: IBus has a checkbox for whether its menu should appear in the panel. The Sound Preferences window should have an equivalent checkbox, but currently doesn’t. It would be great if someone could fix that.
Er, where would that checkbox be? There’s nothing related to a panel icon in the iBus Preferences dialog, and nothing in Language Support.
You should make the program bar icon based like Windows 7. Additionally programs should be able to update their icons running in the program bar to display status like the number of unread messages for an email program. To get expanded status updates the user could just hover over the icon. Application and system service icons could live side by side, there is no need to distinguish them from each other.
I am one of those users who keep icons of certain applications in the notification area because I want them minimized but not completely closed. I agree that the clutter in the notification area needs to be reduced. But at the same time, if the only way available to minimize applications is to keep them in the taskbar, that would result in only successfully moving the clutter there.
May be one could keep the clutter off by having a sort of hybrid solution inspired by Google Chrome where the user could minimize the application in such a way that only the icon for this application is visible… something that looks like in this mockup.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8945238@N03/4544101613/
These icons are simply the minimized windows and not application launchers. Once the application is closed, they will disappear too.
Personally, I like having icons for running apps like Pidgin in my notification area. It’s a notification that Pidgin is running. A taskbar entry is not appropriate if there are no chat windows for it to display. (Having the buddy list window there at all times could get to be annoying.)
My solution to the space/clutter problem has always been vertical panels. I have the 20px left one with applications menu, some useful applets and buttons, and notification area, and the 100px right one with the taskbar, some meters for CPU/RAM/disk usage, pager, clock, and a Quicklauncher grid. For a widescreen monitor this consumes very little of the available space while maximizing use of it. The only downside is there’s a fair bit of waste at the left, that basically has to be left open for the notification area to grow. I haven’t yet found a use for it, because my panels are so compact I can’t find anything else to put there.
I can see why you’d want to separate running application icons from actual notifications, but I don’t think that requires any more than sorting them by urgency. Really important ones could blink, but it’s already pretty noticeable when there are different icons than usual over there.
Maybe the solution is to just rename it “status area” or “icon area”? I’ve always viewed them as status icons, whose presence and appearance tells me something. Pidgin is running. Network is functioning normally. Update is available. Just like lights on a dashboard, except they can disappear completely and make room for others when they’re off.
BTW, when I first saw the Notify-OSD messages, I thought it was a broken balloon popup. “WTF? It no longer points to the relevant icon, and I can’t click on it to clear it, and it blinks and disappears while the mouse is on it.” Certainly didn’t look like something that was working correctly.
well i’ve been desperately trying to remove some icons from my notification area, but it appears i can’t. it makes me angry and i’m for the nuke. desktop and ui needs lot of innovation anyway. and always. it utter time to get rid on block style approach anyway. more curves, circles and softshaped figures.
I agree that the systray as it is is garbage, but I don’t agree with the proposed resolution as it stands.
By far the best GUI experience I have had from an OS was with Acorn RISC OS on the Archimedes series of computers. I recommend adopting a similar style for Gnome – not that this will happen. Enlarge the whole taskbar, make it scrollable or expandable, have a large icon for each active application, interactive service, device. Do not have icons for windows, have icons for programs. Each program icon has a menu which can be used to quit the program, focus particular windows, change settings at an application level etc. Even if you close all the document windows for an editor or application, the application remains loaded until you tell it to quit. This is good. :)
The other really good things about RISC OS were the use of contextual menus everywhere (no menu bars) and the use of drag-and-drop to save, load and transfer files between applications. Want to save something? open the filer window to that directory, and drag the file icon from the application to the directory. Simple.
Such changes would require a major overhaul of existing X11 applications, and/or clever wrappers. This could be done gradually. I suppose the “rox” project is more likely to be interested in working on these things than gnome. (well they have already done much of this, recreating some of the RISC OS experience)
If you really want to do something to massively improve the gnome user experience, for goodness’ sake fix the main menu so it pre-scans items and icons and opens instantly when I click it. This is by far the most annoying part of using gnome on my ubuntu system.
I’m glad that you are thinking about UI improvements, but I don’t really see the point of this.
All you are doing, as I see it, is taking the unstructured notification area and applying a rigid structure by categorizing items. Okay. But why does this deserve a separate API? And why should that structure be so rigid, e.g. why not let applications choose which category they should be filed under, instead of under 3 or 5 predefined cateogories (Network, Power, Me, etc). For example, the Applications menu: when an application is installed, it selects which submenu of Applications it should appear in, or it can create a new subcategory. This solution is general, flexible, can be easily modified by the user. If each application needs to be rewritten to support a special API for each of one of several special-purpose, inflexible, Canonical-specified menus…. well, ick.
By the way, I’ve been a developer for menu years and I would love to help you with this, as a designer, programmer, or it whatever capacity I can be most useful.
More pointless and annoying changes while utterly failing to fix severely broken things.
Is this going to be another ill-thought-out half-baked hack job like the current notify and annoy box. You know, the one that stays up in the upper right corner blocking things for long periods of time, totally ignores any theme or color changes, can’t be dismissed or moved – no configuration whatsoever. I have a list of things I remove immediately in Ubuntu and that is near the top. It is too small on my HD and too big on my netbook, but I can’t change it.
One of the complaints is that the actual Gnome notification had actions – if there is new mail, it would open at the new mail message. Or IM or whatever.
It is now been quite a while since the change.
UBUNTU HAS BEEN TOTALLY DEAF TO THOSE WHO HAVE PLEADED, ARGUED, SUGGESTED, or otherwise asked you to fix it or do something so it would work again.
IF I could dismiss this stupid notification, if I could put it somewhere convenient on the screen, if I could make is a visible color in my theme, if I could have the action button, if I could make it appear for a less annoying length of time, if I could make it a proper size for the screen, maybe I wouldn’t object. But it is still the same piece of broken junk under Lucid it was when it was introduced. It won’t be fixed. And you don’t care. This too-big/too-small/too-long/wrong colored annoyance box is here to stay forever on Ubuntu desktops as it is and you will never fix or change anything.
So much for being friendly about user eye-candy. How about actual functionality?
Over 2 years ago I and others noted the broken behavior of network manager. Somehow the fact that NONE of my systems with wireless will recognize I’ve walked across the street to a new AP and change for a half hour, won’t recognize it if I open the applet or not, and other than disabling and reenabling the interface I can’t get it to change the association. Still broken in luciferic lynx.
Bluetooth has been a disaster – Jaunty wouldn’t let you specify PINs so half of the devices could not be paired. Karmic times out before anyone without superhuman speed can type in the pin to the other device.
Video card support just keeps getting worse and worse. I can’t get my second monitor working in all but mirror under Luciferic Lynx. My older laptop became UNUSABLE in Intrepid ask you removed tools to manually correct bad configurations, but left unfixed drivers as the only thing which would talk to the screen – in VESA in the WRONG resolution.
Grub 2 is badly broken. It can’t find any bootable DOS partition, but if you have a USB key it will insist on adding it (or anything on any other removable device) to the fixed disk’s boot menu. INcluding Mac partitions in a way that can’t be booted. Luciferic keeps the breakage.
Is it too much trouble to ask you to simply get some major features that have been broken for years fixed BEFORE you introduce even more changes?
What is worse is I am capable of fixing any or all of these, but I give up after trying to fix the original (won’t pair with half) problem with bluetooth. I can submit fully tested, ready to integrate patches for every one of the problems (My first kernel was 0.9x, I have drivers there, I did one X86 driver, and do complex embedded for a living).
Even were I to hand you complete and ready fixes for any or all these problems they would not end up in any release. For unknown reasons. You don’t want it fixed. No amount of quality, user votes, user input, petitioning, complaints, whatever seems to be able to get something important fixed. Some of this is Gnome or other upstream providers, but why have a distribution which is supposed to be better if you don’t actually do anything except accept the upstream stuff unchanged?
Canonical is WORSE than the iPhone App Store. At least they reject some bad or broken things instead of creating and standardizing them.
So allow me to be skeptical of this change. Your last major UI change is still badly broken, several significant functions are still broken after all these years. What should I expect of this new system?
I wish the following were only tongue in cheek but I need to bookmark this and check back next October to see how many end up being prophetic:
1. It will be broken and/or annoying in several significant ways – the menus will pop up in inconvenient places, not follow the theme, stay up too long or disappear to easily – who knows what. Look at the annoytification you have now.
2. Whatever features or functions were in the applets will completely disappear and be unavailable in the new system – no systray, but no replacement for fundamental functions. “Well, we thought it would be too confusing to actually display how much power was left in the battery so that “menu” won’t have any way of displaying it, but you can open up a terminal”. And you won’t be able to enable or control network interfaces, and it won’t fix any of the above network-manager breakage, so the APs will be from several hours ago, but it will be so much better this way. The interactive buttons in notifications are gone in the new annoytification, more important stuff will disappear never to return from the systray.
3. NOTHING about it will be configurable. Like the annoytification, it will be whatever font, color scheme spacing, scrolling or complete lack of scrolling, position, timing, etc. we choose because we know what is better.
4. It won’t work well on a netbook or low-rez screen or mode because the screen will be too small. And it won’t work right on a 2560×1600 monitor either.
5. It will be difficult but not impossible to retrograde or otherwise rip out the broken junky nonfunctional “better” solution.
6. Other parts of Canonical’s Ubuntu stuff won’t work right with it – probably “U1″ or the music store, much like when U1 was synchronizing the annoytification would be up almost permanently. Those will eventually be “fixed” in some way.
7. Every problem, annoyance, etc. will be reported in Launchpad for Malicious Meerkat starting with the alphas and going through the last beta, and NONE OF THEM will be fixed before the release. Nor afterward at least through Rotten Ratfink.
For me, I’m done recommending Ubuntu. The only advantage left are the repositories that have a lot of options for software, but they aren’t worth it anymore. I’ve side-graded to Xubuntu and am looking for something that has the variety without having the annoyance or perpetual breakage.
Let me summarize.
Whatever the merits of the idea about removing systray for whatever menu thingy, for Malicious Meerkat:
1. You will leave lots of really annoying and longstanding bugs and misfeatures unfixed in 11.04, some of which could be but won’t be fixed by this new system (If in the new menu system I get instant wireless AP updates and problem-free bluetooth pairing, and it is reasonable on my smallest and largest screens, ignore this and the last message). Things that actually give ordinary users a hard time.
2. You won’t have fixed any of the problems resulting from your other UI changes – and my complaint about the annoytification is the complete non-configurability, not the concept or idea as such – it is bad execution to have a stick-too long fecal colored fixed pixel size and position box for EVERY system no matter the screen size or theme. It can’t be that hard, so I must conclude you want it broken.
3. You won’t get the new menu thingy working properly as a replacement, it will have 30% of the functionality of the existing system that will be gone, and won’t address or fix anything at least for several years. I.e. there will be something that won’t really replace what the systray and the applets do today, it will be unconfigurable and annoying, and even broken and no matter the validity and seriousness of the complaints and bug reports from the first alpha to the last beta they won’t be fixed before the release.
Hi!
First off, let me say that i am a relative newcomer to linux, but having tried a variety of different distro’s, i came across Karmic, and instantly fell in love. It was so satisfying on so many levels, some technical, like the integrated Ubuntu Software Center, but not the least among them was the aesthetics- the organic brown and orange, the world music and drums- just awesome. When i first tried Lucid beta, i had an equal and opposite reaction- it was black and a garrish pink. “Well, certainly i can just go into System->Preferences->Appearence, and choose “Humanize”, and get my lovely desktop back…” “No? WHAT?!?! NOOOOO!”
I go into the #ubuntu+1 channel on freenode, and essentially hear that i should love it, change it manually, or leave Ubuntu- there are plenty of other distros. Was karmic’s UI so god-awful that it should be completely abandoned?
Now I read that there are more changes coming by fiat that I’m uncertain about, and I feel completely impotent to effect any change. I think the earlier suggestion of a “pin-to-taskbar” ala chrome is brilliant, and would love to use a desktop with that feature. But the thing about it is that would be an option! I could pin, or not pin, based on how i wanted to use my computer. It would be a feature, not a redesign without choice. Do you see the difference? The Ambiance theme might really trip someone’s trigger, but not mine. So let them use the default, and offer me a classic Humanized. Feature/Choice not redesign/learn-to-live-with-it. I was so excited to find Ubuntu, but now i fear i may have to move on. I just don’t think canonical “gets it”. FYI- i feel about Lucid the way others must have felt about Windows Vista- do you really want that?
I’m afraid I sounded a little too ungrateful. I really just love Karmic in a way that i haven’t loved a desktop OS in the last 20 years (since NeXT, and Karmic’s so much better).
But let me give you an example of why i’m concerned about this decision. I use taskcoach, which uses a notification icon. I used it on Windows, so I’m guessing between all the windows users, and all the other linux distro’s, the developer isn’t going to want to make accommodation for the special case of Ubuntu, which is probably accounts for a very small part of it’s user base.
Of course, there are problems anyway. It’s notification uses a white background, which makes it stand out rather obtrusively in the notification area. And i can’t make it run at startup, because if I do, it’s icon is hidden by the menu bar and not integrated into the notification area.
I guess no OS is perfect, and I don’t expect Canonical to revolve around my personal whims. I just feel like there is a deafness to that which the community wants, and more of a dedication to a vision i’m not sure i understand.
Thank you for a wonderful distro. I still really enjoy Ubuntu.
My goodness. I was considering moving to Ubuntu not too long ago. I’m very grateful that I didn’t. Ubuntu is trying to be Apple. A lot of misguided and arrogant moves lately.
@tx – I wish I could upvote you, becuase you are absolutely right.
Please fix “works in 6.10 but doesnt work in 8.04, 9.04, 9.10″ issues first.
And pray tell me what category of menus does parcellite fall under.
Instead of the clean interface like Windows 7 (yes…really), I will now have a supremely cluttered panel with a million menus.
Eevee: The checkbox is currently labelled “Show icon on system tray”. http://imgur.com/88rmM
John Baptist: We’d be delighted to have your help in adapting applications to the new system. I’ll make a followup post on this site next week with pointers on how to get involved. As I tried to explain in the article, we need a new API because the existing one promotes inconsistent behavior. It’s possible that we could publish guidelines on how notification area items are supposed to behave, and that every application would follow those guidelines — but Microsoft has tried that, and it hasn’t worked for them.
tz: Can you point me to the Bluetooth fix you submitted that has been neglected? Thanks.
I had an idea about the way the user gets informed about upgrades; why not use the session menu, i even read somewhere u will use it for the info when a user needs to restart.
Other than that great work, just started with the LTS with the RC.
:D
Very interesting idea of having more specific menus instead of having a notification area.
But the notification area is very cool to display the progress of the DVD recording, for example.
When I’m burning a DVD, I don’t like to have the application taking up space on the taskbar, and in the Alt + TAB menu.
Pidgin will not be willing to conform to your ways I’m sure (hence why I believe you removed pidgin anyway.) Because Pidgin is cross-platform… if it appears in the tray in Windows, it’ll do the same in linux. Simple as that.
The problem with the messaging indicator is that it reacts to messages with different levels of urgency similarly. New items in a feed reader are something I don’t care much about (why would anyone have a feed reader running constantly anyway?); email I care about, but it’s not nearly as urgent as IM or especially VoIP. Notifications about these things should be different.
Currently I have to click on the message menu just to see which messaging programs are running. Frankly, I’d rather call this a regression than an improvement.
I guess that when you’re unable to fix the things that are really matter and that prevent Ubuntu from really getting somewhere, you have to keep doing cosmetic changes so it gives the impression that someone is still working on the system. You are fooling me no more, though.
I think of these indicator changes like Haiku: The rules set you free to create something elegant and profound. Keep it up and don’t let the nay-sayers get you down; listen to them though, sometimes they have good points, just don’t let their attitude get you down. :-)
@tz
you’re free to use anything you want, buddy… ur lil rant is annoying. i think u should get ur facts straight before coming back in here to whine again.
Looking forward to seeing the spin on making a good network menu. Nm-applet sure grew out of it’s bounds.
Interestingly, they were hobbled by the limited features that a GTK menu offers. So, how will you tackle this? Should be the most complicated of the lot.
Also, will your new DBus machinations provide anything towards a clean global menu so we can move the window menus to the upper panel?
I still this not the proper way.
Whay I found lately is a f***ing annoying HUGE “notification” which takes too much time to dissapear from my desktop and no way to configure (dissable, make smaller, faster, themeable, etc.) it at all.
Instead of wiping out a good tool (systray), why don’t you reconsider making it more “useful”?
Just take as example how Avant Window Navigator does:
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/4876/screenshot1b.png
- Systray is not huge (as in your images)
- Clock is useful (in contrast with your images)
I think that rather than deleting it, ADD ON TO IT — provide an option to “kick it in the nuts” if an application shouldn’t be there — keep a list of applications that should NOT be there and kick them in the nuts if they try….
I think I’d rather see apps giving the system hints as to what they are, along with menu items and stuff, and then the system handles it
as far as I can see, canonical are making a set of destinct menus you add to your panel, and then apps can push themselves onto these menus
which seems too… forced. It seems like the app will have a load of control, and the user very little
which is half of the problem with the current system.
personally, I’d like to see the ability to set apps in three ways. Foreground apps that’d be displayed as in a task bar, background apps that you want open for long periods, but won’t necessarily access all the time, so want ‘out of the way’ for, say, music players, a browser with facebook open, whatever, and then finally permanent apps that would sit in menu’s like ubuntu’s future idea, taking up less space, probably auto-run on boot, etc… for IM/IRC clients, email clients, BitTorrent clients, etc…
(Please excuse the bad formatting, grammar, and slightly rambling tone, this was a muse from an IRC channel I thought I might post somewhere it might get seen).
@Lattyware
Unification can be a good thing. Think Linux kernel.
Can’t wait!
Excellent example how to find a problem that doesn’t exists and how to “solve” it :D
I am living in China. I can see every day what a desire for consistency brings. It is just not possible to meet a wide variety of needs by forcing a single view of consistency.
Fortunately, when it comes to computers, we have the choice – to walk away and find an alternative – or even to start a new team with a different ethos.
Broadly I like Ubuntu, but Lucid disappoints. VPN STILL does not work for me, for example, and currently there are other bugs that are irritating, but this notification issue is a design choice, and it FEELS bad. Things are less convenient, and it is not just unfamiliarity.
I have to say I agree with others that choice is being taken away more generally – for example font size altering is not an option in Empathy (except by finding buried style sheets and manually editing them – hardly in the spirit of Ubuntu as an OS for ordinary human beings)
In my view the amount of code needed for the GUI interface could be reduced, and consistency improved without loss of user flexibility by a few simple changes.
ONE MENU SYSTEM, with the top level strung out across what is now the launcher panel.
THREE TYPES OF MENU ITEM.
1)STATIC PERSISTENT, which are there whether the application is running or not – these would primarily be to launch applications
2)DYNAMIC, which would only be there when the application is running. The menu could add sub items to this menu which could cover all the status stuff we have now, including responding to programs that want to put stuff in sys tray. Each would have its natural home just as the static persistent items. (I guess you could call this its docking point)
3)CONTAINERS (menus), which could hold lower level containers or either of the above.
ONE MENU MANAGER
The user could move the home of individual items to suit their needs, and could decide whether an item was displayed as text, an icon or both (and change the icon or text if desired).
A CONSISTENT BEHAVIOUR ACROSS ALL MENU ITEMS
If a process made any change to its dynamic menu entry the fact of this change would be rippled up to the top level container which would have some attention grabbing behaviour (eg flashing background). Multiple levels of attention grabbing could be provided for programs that understood the protocol, but ALL programs could trigger the basic level simply by changing some aspect of a dynamic item within the container (or its sub containers if any).
Personally, I would prefer containers to open simply by the mouse floating over them, but this should be configurable. for example, some users might think a better option would be to show the content of the item that had triggered the attention grabbing behaviour
This approach puts the user back in control rather than the software developer or the OS/GUI developer, and means that Ubuntu can be what the user NEEDS it to be for them.
I can understand that in a corporate environment, consistency can ease support. Some sort of policy file could allow corporations to restrict their employees ability to reconfigure to whatever level they felt necessary. As it is, the developer is forcing their choice on both corporate and individual users. Or rather pushing the choice to the very top level menu – the one with a list of alternative OSes on it.
This comment is a constructive one, but I cannot completely suppress my outrage: THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA!!!!!
There are several problems that this change will cause:
1) Existing apps: There are many apps that this will break. Many (most?) apps aren’t updated very quickly, and there are hundereds of ones that don’t have any maintatiners anymore. Should all users of these apps just abandon them? If the move would allow for backwards compatibility (by maintaining the notification area, but discouraging its use), that would be one thing. But to remove it completely? How would apps behave if they aren’t changed? If I minimize to the system tray, will the program crash, or will it continue running in the background, wasting resources, with no way to bring it to the foreground again?
2) Users should have the option to have their toolbars, menus, and desktop aranged the way they like. Users that like the new menu system should be able to use it. But those who like the notification tray instead should have the option to do so.
3) Breaking existing user interface standards, no matter what the reason, is almost always a bad idea. Microsoft did it when they removed the ability to use the standard start menu in Windows 7. Don’t go down that road with Ubuntu.
4) There are many downstream distros that are based on Ubuntu, and they may want the option to keep things consistent. I help maintain Nexradix, an Ubuntu derivative. One of our goals is to keep things as constant as possible for users — no one should have to learn a new interface when the upgrade if they don’t want to. If Ubuntu completely removes the old notification area, downstream distros will have to either live with it, or switch to a different upstream base.
5) There is nothing keeping application developers from poorly implimenting a menu entry instead of a notification icon. I can easily see apps making either own seperate menu instead of using the existing networking or sound menu, for example. So really this solves nothing.
6) Menus require more effort to use than icons. I can maximize Deluge by single clicking on its system tray icon. But if it was moved to a network menu, I’d have to click on the network menu, then choose Deluge. That’s more effort for nothing.
7) If this is implimented as part of GNOME-Shell and not GNOME-Panel, it would leave users that don’t like the new shell and want to keep using the panel with limited functionality with many apps.
8) How would apps notify users of simple events? Would pop-up bubbles appear from the menu? Or would they be banned also, causing developers to simply return to the much more annoying pop-up windows?
9) As stated by others, we already have two menus (Applications & System). In any case that a menu would work better than a notification icon, the menu should be put in one of those two places, not in its own menu.
10) If its okay to accomodate Wine and Java apps, why can’t NATIVE ones get to use the system tray if they want to???
I like the idea, and trust that this will end up working very well. The sceptics should try to keep in mind that this is a new idea, and will go through a thorough process of planning and testing before it ends up in 9.10 and more completely in 11.04.
I trust the competence of the people involved, and I’m convinced that if they end up realizing this is a backwards step, they’ll pull the plug.
If I’m wrong there are a bunch of distros to choose from.
10.10, obviously…
1. Changing Linux distributions is not a solution.
2. Do developers have to maintain two versions of their applications? One for other Linux distributions that don’t use this Indicator Applet and (an “inconstant”) one for Ubuntu?
3. Tool-tips convey meaningful information and they do not take the focus away from your current window. Creating extra clicks reduces usability. Adding an option in gconf (or in the applet preferences) to enable tool-tips would hurt nobody. As for Mark Shuttleworth’s argument that tool-tips are abused: a programmer with the “need” to cram “way too much info” in a tool-tip is now going to think “Aha, it must all go in a menu now!” (solving nothing.)
4. Menus can be more easily abused than tooltips. Menus will still be inconsistent. For example, LottaNZB puts the quit menu in the middle of the menu, and Rhythmbox puts it at the end, but also puts “show window” right above it.
5. Reducing clutter. In the screen-shot of the existing gnome Notification Area (with the 7 icons), sure you can remove clutter from here, but those icons have to go somewhere. They take up less space in the Notification area than if they were in the Indicator Applet or Window List. If someone has that many things open, are they _really_ worried about clutter?
6. Notification area. I am interested in the evidence of “its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things”.
7. Taking away the ability to configure things goes against the whole idea of Linux. If there is concern that creating options creates clutter, put the options in gconf.
Please give the option for people to use the old system that worked much better :).
5 and a half years ago, we started an ambitious mission to fix bug 1. Are we there yet? I think very close.
Having one notification icon that shows just an indicator for new “system messages” could be ok for many applications, but for cetain others not.
I clearly want to have some things separated: Battery status and Skype missed calls is such a case (just to give an example).
I can understand wanting to aggregate things to reduce clutter, but I have to side with the people who aren’t in favor of nuking the notification area. Consolidation is useful for things like chat clients and e-mail, where you were going to click for more information anyway, but simpler information is liable to get buried.
Let’s use the battery icon as an example. In 9.10, to find out how much power was left in my laptop battery, I simply had to hover the mouse cursor over an icon. I was then told that, say, my battery was 80% full and that Ubuntu predicted that it would last another two and a half hours. Now, I have to click on an icon, which only gives me a predicted run time. To find out how full the battery is, I have to also click on that to open a new window and scroll down to the information. Far be it from me to assume others will agree, but I certainly consider this much less convenient.
Now, I’m not saying the menu idea is without merit, but entirely removing the notification area seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Farewell to Ubuntu
If it aint broke dont fix it. Yes, it is old, but why change something just for the sake of change?
I tried Lucid and i absolutely hate this system – menu here menu there click click…
The normal notification area is way simpler to make things work – i see my messaging apps/browser/mail (i use Opera and it has icon there) that are running in a glance – no need to click through menus/applets/whatever.
OSD is another example of unpopular but adopted design component – it is absolutely annoying that it just doesnt go away (c’mon it is THAT hard to place a close button on it?).
Also, there is the default button placing that fells in the same category – guys, there are only 2 options – left or right – the right-hand placed buttons are used by most of computers users around the world – both Windows and Linux (mostly) defaults to it (probably ~85-90%).
The left-hand buttons are used by less people – Mac and possibly some others i dont know of, but still its around 10-15%.
Why these changes apart from solely the need to make Ubuntu stand out because they dont solve anything – and why a distro that is growing adopts design decisions that are similar to a less-used OS than the widely-used one? And also makes some other decisions that are unique but dont solve anything but complicates things for users and developers alike (and upsets the community sometimes)?
/rant off
Bye Ubuntu, hello Debian
And just to think, I was just looking for ways to make minimized windows become icons in the notification area, just to find that in the next release this lovely notification area is going to be removed (and back to finding ways to organize the onslaught of minimized windows).
“I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”.
You don’t seem to actually do the difference between being minimized in the taskbar and being iconified…
You attack our software, while your distribution is the one making it difficult to integrate our software in the users desktop…
Instead of attacking people, maybe you should look at yourself and providing solutions.
Thank you for your hard work! If you’re really planning on replacing the Gnome clock applet, please make something that include an interactive calendar just like clock applet do. Its integration with Evolution is what makes it so good.
Honestly, the indicator applet is one of the most bizarre design decisions I’ve seen in a while. The fact that I have to click on something and pull up a menu to see how much battery life I have left is insane. That’s like making a little clock icon that you have to click on to see what time it is. I understand that the old system is inconsistent, but if we’re going to design a new system let’s please not make it useless. I don’t want to click on menus to see critical information (e.g. how many new messages I have in the messaging icon). Just show me the info! If I wanted to click on things to get critical information I’d just open up the relevant applications!
Why not make an indicator just for Wine applications? Wine could just throw any systray icons into it’s indicator. Then clicking the Wine indicator would bring down the list of windowz programs using the “systray”. Actually, an indicator for programs needing fallback might be a good idea too. Less clutter.
You may also want to add functionality allowing the user to move specific tray icons back to the old style. There will be certain cases where people need one or two programs to behave the same.
I agree, the system as it is now is a mess. But, giving the users what they want is really important if Bug #1 is to be solved. Its hard to please everybody, but making it possible for people to decide “no, I want it as it was.” couldn’t hurt.
Good luck, bug #1 has been open for too looooong. I just can’t stand the non-secure, non-fast, non-free, use-it-the-way-it-is windows stuff that comes on these new machines. And I really hate having to agree to a contract before I can use my own computer.
davorao: Using the session menu to notify people of updates would be even worse than using a dedicated icon, because the icon would have to convey two things at once.
Alexander Khodyrev: I agree. Messaging applications should always make it optional whether they appear in the messaging menu at all.
al: Thanks for your constructive feedback.
Somebody: What you’re describing is what Windows Vista and 7 do, which I already covered.
Denis: I described the problem here: http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/
Tony Lovasco: (1) We have a roadmap to fix the applications. (2) Users have the freedom to do whatever they like as long as they have the source code. Design involves making decisions. (3) If there’s only one kind of Start menu available by default in Windows 7, that is the standard Start menu by definition. We can’t sensibly discuss “user interface standards” if you’re using a different definition of the word “standard” than everyone else. (4) Never changing anything is a slow road to irrelevance. (5) This is not an issue of absolutes: if it’s harder for developers to do the wrong thing, even if it’s not impossible, that’s still good. (6) It’s not for nothing, it’s for consistency and predictability. (7) No, it’s not implemented as part of gnome-shell. (8) “Simple event” is unhelpfully vague, but here’s our design guidelines for notifications. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines (9) What two places? (10) We’re not “accommodating” Wine and Java apps. They’ll probably have to use a floating window for notification area items.
Perky: (1) Not a solution to what? (2) No, they can use a library that embeds their menu into the notification area on other OSes. (3) “Reduces usability” is unhelpfully vague. Which aspect of usability in particular? (4) You have a good point in that we need guidelines on how to structure a menu. Rhythmbox will hopefully replace its custom menu with a section of the sound menu. (5) You are incorrectly assuming that they wanted all those icons visible in the first place. (6) We haven’t tested that issue specifically, but when running user tests on machines that needed updates, nobody noticed the icon. (7) No, making the notification area optional would make the whole problem even worse.
Gaijin D, Nick: I’ll update the battery menu specification to have an option for showing the time remaining in the menu title.
Kertesz L.: We’re not changing this just for the sake of change. I described the problems with the notification area here: http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/
JB VLC: I don’t know what you’re referring to. Can you be more specific?
This is still a very unpopular decision. Matthew, so many of the posts complain that clicking for example the Rhythmbox icon doesn’t bring up the program. You’re playing a little silly by repeatedly asking people to explain what usability issues the new design causes, or saying that their comments were too vague. It’s simply too hard to get to programs compared to the old functionality. Simple as that.
In reply to Matthew Paul Thomas’s comments on my issues:
(1) “We have a roadmap to fix the applications” — Your roadmap can’t possibly deal with 3rd party apps not in the repositories. The fact is, if you remove this feature that they rely on, you are likely causing them not to work.
(2) “Users have the freedom to do whatever they like as long as they have the source code.” Really? You’re playing the “if you don’t like it, fix it yourself” card?? Seems a bit ironic given the entire point of addressing interface issues is to make things easier for end-users that can’t code.
(3) “If there’s only one kind of Start menu available by default in Windows 7, that is the standard Start menu by definition.” No, a standard is based upon widespread adoption, not simply the latest version available.
(4) “Never changing anything is a slow road to irrelevance.” No one is arguing that nothing be changed. We’re arguing that no features be removed. There is a huge difference between encouraging a new standard and making the old one unusable.
(5) “This is not an issue of absolutes: if it’s harder for developers to do the wrong thing, even if it’s not impossible, that’s still good.” Right, unless of course you follow your own advise and consider that “Users have the freedom to do whatever they like as long as they have the source code.” … Meaning developers will do as they please, and your decison will simply limit the number of usable apps for Ubuntu and its derivatives.
(6) “It’s not for nothing, it’s for consistency and predictability.” If you wanted consistenecy and predictablity, you should encourage a standarized usage of the notification area, not the abolishment of it. Expecting something to work basically the same way it did before you upgraded is consistent… having it work differently isn’t.
(7) “No, it’s not implemented as part of gnome-shell.” I guess that’s a good thing, then.
(8) ““Simple event” is unhelpfully vague” Fair enough.
(9) “What two places?” — the Applications or Systems menu. We don’t need more menus on the panel.
(10) “We’re not “accommodating” Wine and Java apps. They’ll probably have to use a floating window for notification area items.” Oh, great. So it isn’t bad enough that a user has to use a Windows program in Wine. Now their app looks and acts completely differently than it does in Windows…
Again, this whole issue can be fixed with a compromise — keep the notification area intact, and simply encourage its proper use. For the applications that are developed by Ubuntu devs, make the changes. For those that aren’t, try to encourage good behavior. But don’t force end-users to a completely different user experience just because a few developers do things you don’t care for.
This is just like Gnome and their UI puritanism.
The goals are laudable, but this is just going to break compatibility and annoy people. I want some persistent windows to be out of the way and yet available/visible on all desktops.
Implement a full solution, and THEN remove what I’m using.
Pat: As far as I can tell, yours is the only comment here complaining that clicking the Rhythmbox icon no longer displays the Rhythmbox window. However, that’s a decent point. In Maverick, the new sound menu will not only obsolete the Rhythmbox-specific menu, but also reduce the need to use the Rhythmbox window in the first place. Unfortunately, the person porting Rhythmbox’s notification area item for 10.04 didn’t know about the Maverick sound menu, and I didn’t know they were doing the porting. Sorry about that.
Tony Lovasco: (1) True, if an application is outside the official repositories, it’s more of a challenge keeping up with API changes. (The same applies to being compatible with the shipped Python version, for example.) That’s one reason we’ve given developers 6~12 months notice (depending on whether they’re targeting UNE). Improving information for independent developers is another big challenge for us at the moment. (2) No, obviously I’m not saying “fix it yourself”, because this whole change is about fixing something that we regard as broken. But if you disagree, you have the freedom to fork. (3) Do you regard the Windows 95/98/2000 title bar theme (the same vintage as the Start menu you miss) as “standard” too? (4) It’s a defensible point that we should never remove features. But our developer numbers and application numbers are both tiny enough that we judge it’s not worth it. (5) Yep, I addressed that in the article. (6) Gnome tried that for eight years, but it didn’t work. Time to try something else. (9) I think you omitted your argument there, it’s just a bald assertion. (10) Obviously it won’t be “completely different”; the already-existing difference in title bars, for example, is far greater than the difference in notification area presentation will be.
I wish Ubuntu (Gnome) did the task bar like Windows 7, where you see an icon and it doubles as a menu for that application (or folder). This is also how OS X behaves and aside from being super useful, it saves a lot of screen space (and looks prettier).
Wow, there is a lot of criticism, even going on two months after you made this post.
I find it odd that people are accusing you and the design team of removing functionality before a replacement exists. You’ve already started deploying early versions of the replacement while keeping existing functionality during the transition: Lucid still has a notification applet, as will Maverick according to your post (though not UNE). I would imagine that a year is suitable notice for feature changes.
A quick question on behalf of the users of out-of-repository software, or those who use software such as AllTray. Is the removal of the notification area mean that applet will no longer be available at all (FUSA is no longer available in ‘Add to Panel’)? Or it will just not be part of the default panel (‘Log Out’ and ‘Lock Screen’ are still available)? There are many, many non-default panel applets that are still available, and I think if users were aware of being able to manually add the notification area back if they desire or require it, it would eliminate much of this argument.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you. As both a user and developer, I personally really enjoy the changes. I’m looking forward to Mavrick!
Keep up the good work!
Perspective.
Accountants want to categorize everything by cost and invoice,
Engineers want to categorize everything by product.
What ever happened to flashing the minimized toolbar area when you want some attention?
Oh, you are a stealth background app? then build a minimized window and start flashing for attention.
Keep it Simple Smartie.
I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but the proposal sounds like it would be obnoxious to use if implemented. I like the system tray because it’s unobtrusive. I often don’t /want/ notifications popping up in my face while I’m working, even if they don’t steal focus.
One more thing. I take issue with this bit:
“The situation is made worse by developers who feel the urge to add a notification area icon for their application just because they can.”
Maybe – just maybe – devs use the system tray because it makes sense? It’s a sensible place to put icons for things like bittorrent clients, which need to be accessed sometimes, but shouldn’t necessarily clutter the taskbar.
I know, you could make a pop-up downloads menu, and put bittorrent icons there. But then instead of a horizontal system tray, you’d have a vertical menu. Why do all this work for such a marginal change?
Clint
PS: I’ve been an Ubuntu user since Hoary. I’m not just resisting change here, I genuinely think this proposal is a dumb idea.
Wrong through and through. Its great that there are two ways to minimize programs in Windows (I never used Ubuntu…) because there ARE different kinds of programs.
I want to have my messenger or player minimized in a hardcore fashion and my browser and text editor minimized in a slightly lighter fashion, because I keep switching between the latter.
Make sure you have metrics and data that proves that users have trouble using ‘system tray’ before killing it.
You guys have entirely missed the point. Just because Microsoft — and yourselves — insist on calling it a Notification Area, doesn’t make it a notification area. It’s a system tray.
That’s why Microsoft tried to encourage people to only use it for notifications, and failed. It’s because the community of developers out there co-opted the systray for their own interface innovation: it is a compact, easy-to-use area for presenting icon-based miniaturized applications. Notifications? Pah!
I look at my current systray, and I see eight icons. Of those, only three give notifications, but that’s not why I have them there. That’s a side-benefit. The real reason I have them there is because they’re instantly available with just a single click from any desktop, in a fixed position, without me needing to scan through lists of *dozens* of minimized windows in the task bar.
The systray is a fantastic example of interface innovation that didn’t come out of a committee, it came out of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of developers who recognized a brilliant idea when they saw it and refused to bow to Microsoft’s idea of what the systray was for. It’s for whatever users decide to use it for.
The fact that you keep calling it a notification area, when it so plainly is *not* a notification area, demonstrates that you just don’t get it.
“On Windows, in theory, a left single-click is supposed to “display whatever users most likely want to see”, a right-click is supposed to display a context menu, and a left double-click is supposed to either “Perform the default command on the context menu” or “perform the same action as a left single-click”.
This is also what they’re supposed to do in GNOME, according to the HIG. If apps aren’t doing that, just file bugs to get them fixed, rather than re-inventing the wheel.
I would like to agree that the system tray is inefficient. For the most part, I would agree. But the solutions proposed here will not solve the problem from the users perspective. It will merely add a layer of abstraction which might be great in future when we _really_ have an alternative.
But I believe the things proposed here will only make things *worse*. You’ll end up searching through ui-bloat for the simplest notification — entirely why I disabled the current notification system used for IM/mail in Ubuntu.
I don’t think it is something we can just drop now — and if we are going to drop it, it will require something that is more efficient than what we have now. As it happens, sometimes messy is best.
Dropping support for the notification area/system tray in future releases of Ubuntu could be a disaster unless a decent replacement is proposed.
I like indicator applets. They act coherently and behave the same way all of them. However, the only thing I don’t like much is the little control the user can have over them. For example, to be able to hide and indicator I actually have to uninstall it from Synaptic. I would prefer and appreciate that an small interface would appear in the right click menu (say, Options) and then from there you could select which indicator applets you want to see. I think this doesn’t hurts, and will make users more happy.
THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA!
I want to be able to access three things quickly. A MENU, the PROGRAM itself, and a TOOLTIP. With indicator applets (or menus) right now, only the Menu is easily accessible. Tooltips could be implemented (and I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be), but how about accessing the Program easily? Going to Menu->Show isn’t good enough for me.
I do believe that the scenario that’s happening the most now is good enough and maybe should be somehow standardized. Left-click means show (and again means hide), right-click pops the menu.
I have a nice idea, which would work nicely and could easily be made to be backwards compatible. Have a central ICON TRAY, for applications, and keep some of the menus(for sound, wireless, clock, battery, power).
The central place on the top bar is usually taken by various icons for different programs. My idea is to nicely organize these icons by the categories in Applications, and use them also as “notification icons” when those respective programs are working. The interface to them would be as the user expects: Left-click means show (and again means hide), right-click pops the menu. I’d appreciate feedback on this.
Hi there,
Thinking about how to improve the workspace is great. The gnome-panel experience in 10.04 is very poor in my perspective. Menus are not the easiest way to access information rapidly.
The Systray (or whatever the name of this applet) is in itself a good tool but it should be customisable. In fact (and this is what Linux is about) it should be how users want it to be, therefore it should be completely flexible. The system tray if i want should display all running applications or just one according to my preferences. People who are bothered by it remove it, those who want specific applications to be displayed there choose for it.
Notifying is another concept. Two things can be done about it.
1. make a notification area that does just that, i.e. notifying (with popups for instance). Again it should be customisable and filtered (it should be what, how and where the user wants it to be)
2/ merge the notification with the system tray, i.e. display or animate an icon when a program solicits attention. A popup does not necessarily needs to come forth on the screen. Just as in a dock, an icon could just “wiggle” or “blink”, “be zoomed in” to signify “hey i’ve got something to tell” and hovering this icon should be enough to launch the popup.
Having all open applications in the taskbar would suck badly. If you use a ring-switcher of compiz (which greatly enhances switching) there is a limit to the amount of windows your brain can handle.
The current configuration, especially the indicator applet sucks big time. Why do i have this envelop there on my panel while i am not even using any email program nor chat? Oh yes, i use skype and it’s not under the mail symbol. Why is it stuck with my battery and sound icon? why is my name displayed near the shut-down button? i know my name and don’t need a reminder thanks.
Make a design that is discreet and efficient. Efficient means i need not move much or click to get what i want, it also means it is not standing in my way when i don’t want it. What you propose makes some sense (classifying applications) but in fact in creates extra actions by the user unfold the classification. In the end it does not make it easier and you make Ubuntu inflexible.
I’ve now posted a follow-up on how you can help with the notification area transition.
http://design.canonical.com/2010/06/help-wanted-notification-area/