April 21st, 2010 byUbuntu 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.
The toolkit
112 Responseshide comments
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.
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
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.
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).