June 30th, 2010 byTwo months ago I wrote about how Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area.
An important part of this work is surveying Ubuntu applications that use the notification area, working out what they should do instead, and fixing them.
Ubuntu’s own Kees Cook recently ran a couple of massive searches through the source code of the Ubuntu archive, finding the telltale code where a program adds a notification area item. (That’s one of the benefits of most of Ubuntu’s software being open source.)
The next step is where we’d like your help. We now have a list of dozens of programs that use the notification area. What we need now is a description of how each of them use it. What does the notification area item do when you click it, if anything? If the item has a menu, what does the menu contain? Are there any Preferences items, menu bar items, or other places referring to the “Notification area” or the “tray”? If so, where are they? Once we know these things, we can make proposals on how to fix them.
So if you have a few spare minutes, please choose one of the programs on the list, install it from Ubuntu Software Center, study how it uses and mentions the notification area, and add your notes to the wiki page.
If you know of programs that use the notification area in Ubuntu but aren’t listed, please add them to the page too. Maybe they use a toolkit other than GTK or Qt (so Kees’s searches didn’t find them), or maybe they’re proprietary applications, or maybe they’re just not in the Ubuntu repositories. Either way, we’ll do what we can to get them fixed.
Thanks for your help!
The toolkit
25 Responseshide comments
Umm.. deluge has a notification icon, but it’s not on the list.
Left clicking the icon shows/hides the window, while right clicking shows a menu, where you can again show/hide the window, add a new torrent, start/pause all downloads, set upload/download max speed, and finally exit the app.
What about Windows software installed using Wine? How will those programs be handled? I haven’t seen wine in the list.
Luis, other than a promise from Mark to not break anything for Wine users at UDS, there really is no plan for how to handle them well. Wine apps need everything that is supposed to be deprecated in the notification area – separate actions on left/right click, arbitrary spawning of their own functionality or menus, and even minimize to tray.
If we take those things away when a Wine app entirely depends on them, we break both the app and the user experience.
Honestly, the end result of this discussion may be to move the notification area into its own package that Wine (and preferably only Wine) depended on.
skype should be in the list..
I’m excited for these changes. Great work
.
Openoffice Quickstart Icon creates a white square on the Panel when a dark theme is used.
I didn’t see Thunderbird (minimize to tray add-on) on there. I also didn’t see Exaile.
Are there plans to integrate those into the messaging and sound menus?
While I think the idea of establishing more consistent behavior is good in general, I’m a bit nervous about the way it is being handled. It seems far too dependent on application-specific fixes, and I worry that many applications may be left behind.
Wine applications, as well as applications developed in platform independent environments (such as Java), as well as proprietary applications seem likely to be either left with problems, or may continue to depend on the old notification area.
This situation where some applications are tightly integrated into the new system while others still use the old one seems like it would be worse than simply keeping the old system. At least before we had one system that was consistently inconsistent, so the user knew to expect each icon to behave differently, and cross-platform applications behaved similarly in Ubuntu and Windows or other operating systems.
Now it seems likely that people who use cross-platform applications not designed for Ubuntu (created by developers who may never have heard of Ubuntu) will need to live with two separate notification area systems, one of which may not even be installed by default on future versions of Ubuntu. This seems like a step backward.
I’m certainly in favor of looking for ways to make applications fit in and look native on Ubuntu, but it should preferably be done in a way that it is handled transparently by the cross-platform libraries and runtimes, rather than individual applications.
Ideally, an application developer shouldn’t need to know whether the application is running on Ubuntu, Windows, Fedora, or Mac OSX. The biggest problem I see here is that this new system takes away flexibility in the pursuit of consistency, and because of that it is not merely presenting the application’s interface in a more integrated way, but rather it is forcing the application to change its interface to match the OS, which is the wrong way around in my opinion.
It seems to me that one major reason that so many applications “abused” the notification area (by using it for things other than notifications) was that it served a very useful (non-notification) purpose, and wasn’t actually all that great at providing notifications.
As I see it, there are basically three types of programs:
1) Daemons: run in the background and provide services to other programs, no direct user interaction. These are generally started automatically either when the system starts, or as needed by other applications. No GUI is needed for these.
2) Active applications: Word processors, image editors, games, web browsers. These applications are often document-centric, and generally don’t do anything useful unless the user is actively interacting with them. They are tightly associated with one or more windows, and can safely be terminated when all windows are closed. The taskbar is the appropriate GUI element for manging the windows of these applications, and the applications usually don’t need management separate from their windows.
3) Background applications: Email & IM programs, music players, Bittorrent clients, etc. These are applications that are generally started by the user, and require some direct interaction with the user, but perform a large part of their functionality in the background without user interaction (playing music, waiting for messages, transferring files, etc).
The user is likely to want them open for extended periods of time when they are not actively interacting with them. The application still needs to run in the background even when all of its windows are closed, and needs a small area to display its status. Ideally, this status should take a very small amount of space on the screen, but always be visible without the user needing to open a menu or actively interact with anything. This status display should also serve as an interface to open additional windows for interacting with the program as needed.
The Notification Area/System Tray has been used for type #3 applications because it provided exactly what they needed, and it was really the only good mechanism for doing so. It seems like the new application indicator system is attempting to provide a new solution for type #3 applications, but it seems to be relying on applications conforming to its own organization and menu structure, rather than trying to accommodate applications as they are.
This may be very problematic for platform-agnostic applications because it seems like it would be difficult to create an application that would work seamlessly on both Ubuntu and other operating systems.
Will ya let us to use the good old design? I like the upstream-ish branding more than your new. Can you create something like in openSuSE, a *-branding-upstream packages, with a metapackage branding-upstream, which will get rid of all this new bloat and do it as it was intended by people from gnome/etc.?
I’ve posted heavily about this in the original announcement thread, but since not everyone will go back and read that, I’d like to renew my objections to this here.
It appears obvious that this decision has been made, regardless of the widespread opposition to it seen on the previous posting.
Please at least recognize that there are many, many users that want this feature to stay, and at least make the applet available as a separate package that users can install from the repositories, even if it isn’t installed by default.
I agree with one of the statements on the old page that said to rename it to the System Tray. The system tray isn’t inconsistent, in my opinion. For example, Rhythmbox. When I click its icon on the system tray, it brings the window open. I agree with the statement that it would be convenient if you didn’t have to open the window to change songs, but that’s the thing. If I wanted to hit next, I have a key for that on my keyboard. If I want to open my mail client, I have a key for that as well. The main reason I want to show Rhythmbox on one click is so I can select the next song, or maybe I’m building a Last.fm playlist. Most other background applications or daemons function the same way, where if I want to bring it back up, I can just click the icon.
Another example of a pointless usage of this new system would be the notification-messages package. The mail-IM-centric part. I don’t use e-mail OR IM on this computer, because I do all that on my second computer, right beside it, running Windows.(I use Digsby.) Why, then, would I want to waste my already cluttered gnome-panel space with a mail icon that will NEVER be used? I mean seriously.
The original reason I decided to use Linux was because it’s customizable. I can tear it apart and rebuild it however I want. Where is the customization here? Where is the user choice? You’re forcing a choice that most of the community is against. I understand that you don’t want to use the “Notification Area,” because it doesn’t do what it was originally created for, but it’s not a “notification area” at all! It’s a system tray!
At least keep it in the repositories for us to use if we want to!
However, I’m not completely against the new ideas. I don’t think you’re doing it right, but I have faith in the people that created an OS as wonderful as Ubuntu. I believe you guys will come up with a way to make this intuitive and familiar, rather than menus, menus, and more menus. I’ll be willing to test programs that use it for you, and give my feedback, but I’d hope you’ll actually listen to what I have to say about it.
I’m not saying this isn’t an interesting idea, it’s just… Still too fledgeling to make standard in an operating system.
Thanks.
-Axel
Thank you to everyone who’s helped test the programs! It’s been a big help.
Kwpolska, Tony Lovasco: Yes, it will be possible to install gnome-panel with the notification area.
Axel: The name of the element isn’t the problem — after all, the name is hardly visible to anyone using Ubuntu. The problem is its overuse and inconsistency.
# “The name of the element isn’t the problem — after all, the name is hardly visible to anyone using Ubuntu. The problem is its overuse and inconsistency.”
Inconsistency? All complete formal systems are inconsistent, and all consistent formal systems are incomplete. If you want to provide a complete solution, inconsistency is the price you pay.
Overuse? The path is made by walking.
Look at the history. People didn’t want a notification area; they wanted a tray. That’s A) why Windows promptly sprouted a dozen programs whose purpose was (and) is to allow people to force programs into the tray, and B) why you want to get the notifications out of it.
What programs belong in the tray? That’s a decision best left to the user — imposing solutions from the top down is anti-ergonomic — but I generally find that the so-called window list/taskbar is where I look for a current specific named document, whereas the tray is for programs whose current document is dynamic or nonexistent, and whose icon is therefore sufficient to identify.
# “Now it seems likely that people who use cross-platform applications not designed for Ubuntu (created by developers who may never have heard of Ubuntu) will need to live with two separate notification area systems, one of which may not even be installed by default on future versions of Ubuntu. This seems like a step backward.” – Kasoroth
Kasoroth highlighted some important issues(IMHO). Are there any plans to address these issues?
Retaining backwards compatibility can impede development; I understand that, but I fear that in this case you are over looking an issue that might make the continued adoption of Ubuntu difficult for a significant number of immigrants (from windows in particular). By not supporting the notification area in a way that is transparent to all/most applications (that i as a user am accustomed to using) or providing a reasonable compromise, you are effectively presenting me with an ultimatum; your way or the highway.
When minimising Adobe Air applications the app is not minimised but rather sent to the notification are in stead.
In short, without the notification area, the app can not be retrieved.
PS: it would be great to have something that functions like in-the-notification-area-reduced applications. For instance i run win 7 on virtualbox and the virtualbox window remains open whilst i don’t really need it at all except for settings and start-up. If i could force it to be reduced to an icon rather than being minimised among other open applications (which i keep switching back and forth with Alt+Tab). The reduction of apps into an icon in Notification Area makes sense for deamons/
Would it not be possible to make some applet that would pick up any process from the System Monitor and allow to reduce/restore applications such as Virtualbox? If this applet would be optional and customizable it would be a great tool.
Also: what will be the status of Skype in this new system? The GUI provided by Skype sucks, will it be implemented in a better way in the future releases?
Thanks.
It was back in 2007 that I started using Ubuntu. This was following a brief encounter with Vista – which I rapidly discovered was going to result in my PC getting drop-kicked out of my apartment window (well…not really, but it was driving me mad in a hurry on a whole variety of levels). I’d heard about Ubuntu, so thought I’d give it a try – see if it could tide me over until I got XP back up and running.
3 years on, I’ve never gone back.
The first thing which really struck me at that point was the whole UI experience – that it really felt, unlike Vista which I’d just had a brief encounter with – like it had been built around the user.
While there have been a couple of tweaks through the years since then – 10.04 has been the first version where I’ve seen changes which have really irritated me.
The single irritation: Those icon-impersonating menus which have suddenly appeared on the panels.
My system tray contains four icons: Hplip (double-clicking this gets me to the toolbox, and it can be enabled/disabled in the prefs), Gmail notifier (looking a mess, because nobody will fix the handling of transparent backgrounds…), the network manager, volume control, and the trashcan. …And that stupid envelope/messenger manager thing which I have no use for. However, I can’t get rid of it – because if I do, I then lose the icons for Kalarm, Rhythmbox and my volume control. The volume control I can live without, but perpetually having to dig out the other programs when they’ve been minimised to the tray…but don’t appear there gets annoying in a hurry.
On the upper panel, I’ve got the power button (having ditched the user menu which took up an unnecessary amount of space…then realising I’d lost the power button with it…See also: Volume control!). Next to that I’ve got the clock, weather applet, CPU/memory/network/HD activity meters, CPU scaling meter and temperature displays for both HD’s and the CPU. …These I should point out look a mess because the backgrounds are the wrong colour. …See also the transparency handling issue which seems to date back about five years…
Also annoying: That Rhythmbox and KAlarm both use similar menus – why then insist on showing a tiny menu an inch square that you need to scroll up and down on I have no idea either…why not just open the menu to a sufficient size to see everything on it?
The simple reason that program developers have leapt on the systray and used it for all manner of purposes is that it works. While you dismissed it in your original post, making the comparison to a car dealer supplying a roll of masking tape to blank off unwanted warning lights on a car dashboard; I reckon that the single largest improvement that can be made here to the systray is to give the users the option to boot icons that they don’t need/want out there.
I can’t actually think of any programs that I use which pop up icons in there contrary to my wishes where I cannot disable that behaviour.
I do acknowledge that icon behaviour is in some cases inconsistent however…I don’t think that nuking a very useful bit of the UI is the answer though! …let’s face it…the first thing that will happen if you do, is that someone will write a program to serve the same purpose!
While I’m generally the last person to give Microsoft any credit (being an Amiga and Acorn user at heart), I have to admit that the taskbar, start menu and systray have proved to be very well thought out ideas. One of the most useful applications I ever installed on my Amiga was basically a third party program which behaved just as that! RiscOS with its lack of toolbars and context-sensitive everything works very well too – but this does at times have its flaws, and definitely would seem quite alien to new users migrating from Windows.
I say, “Save the systray!” …Yes, I shall continue to call it that as well.
Menus just seem a bad idea – not least from a workflow efficiency point of view – the last thing you want to do is to introduce additional button clicks into the equation.
…Which is exactly what this seems to do. Rather than now clicking on one icon to bring Kalarm, Rhythmbox etc to the foreground, I’ve now got to click the icon then click show whatever-program-it-is-here. Plus, there seems to be no way to remove individual items from these menus.
As I mentioned above…I see the messenger menu as (for me) pointless. Especially as it doesn’t even bother to highlight when I’ve got new mail unless I happen to have Evolution running…when Evolution does so anyhow. In fact, it instead makes itself incredibly annoying by highlighting every time anyone says anything in any channel on IRC in Konversation.
As far as update management goes, I think the icon was quite enough – it was plainly visible as something which wasn’t normally there, and drew your attention to the fact that something needed your attention. The window itself popping up is just incredibly irritating – and in my case at least tends to get updates forgotten about for longer than the icon did. Simply because once I close the update manager window, that’s all notification that updates are needed gone until the window pops up again 24 hours later. With the notification icon, I would tend to remember pretty soon after I was finished whatever task prevented me from carrying out the update there and then.
I think I’ve rambled enough now – but I think my views are clear enough. Either leave it alone, or add the functionality to manually remove those rogue programs which insist on putting pointless icons there.
From what I’ve read both here and in the original post which detailed the plans to kill the systray, it appears that there’s a very large number of people who agree here – and they’re the people who are actually using this software day in, day out, in the real world.
…Oh…And please fix the transparency handling bug…We’ve only been asking for the last five years.
You are doing a great job for linux..
Just wanted to add my 2 cents.
For starters: I am not a particular Linux enthousiast or fanatic. I have no strong beliefs, I just use the OS.
I am a programmer and I like scripting, automation and flexibility. I like the freedom Linux offers me.
But I don’t want to spend an entire day hacking to get the OS to work my way. My time is precious, and Linux is not my hobby, I need it to be productive.
My experience after installing Lucid:
- I don’t understand the session thingie with the username and powerbutton. I just wanted the powerbutton, and I still don’t really understand what the user menu is all about.
- The messaging menu is also a bit weird. The point of a email or IM notification is that it points your attention to something. I don’t to poll a menu to see if I have a message. Bizarre…
So I dumped those. I don’t really have strong feelings about this subject, but I don’t like the menu style.
The notification area allows freedom and innovation to application developers. Applying a hard format seems really silly to me.
But that’s just me. Is there a poll or something about this?
Something objective to go on?
Just wanted to add my 2 cents.
For starters: I am not a particular Linux enthousiast or fanatic. I have no strong beliefs, I just use the OS.
I am a programmer and I like scripting, automation and flexibility. I like the freedom Linux offers me.
But I don’t want to spend an entire day hacking to get the OS to work my way. My time is precious, and Linux is not my hobby, I need it to be productive.
My experience after installing Lucid:
- I don’t understand the session thingie with the username and powerbutton. I just wanted the powerbutton, and I still don’t really understand what the user menu is all about.
- The messaging menu is also a bit weird. The point of a email or IM notification is that it points your attention to something. I don’t to poll a menu to see if I have a message. Bizarre…
So I dumped those. I don’t really have strong feelings about this subject, but I don’t like the menu style.
The notification area allows freedom and innovation to application developers. Applying a hard format seems really silly to me.
And I would really miss the notification area.
But that’s just me. Is there a poll or something about this?
Something objective to go on?
Just two practical design comments:
1. The indicator-applet in Lucid should not show the envelope icon if there are no messaging apps being used on that system. It is an annoying in several ways, to see a permanently closed envelope that you know you won’t use, and it takes up valuable space on a small screen (made worse by the generous inter-icon spacing; see 3).
At least, there should be a “properties” context menu option to switch it off. Or it should disappear by itself when unused.
Some Lucid users kill indicator-applet and install gnome-volume-control-applet for the sole purpose of getting rid of the unwanted envelope; some of those users would probably like the new Sound Menu functionality, so it’s a bit silly that they can’t choose to have that alone.
2. The envelope provides a “Setup Chat” option, which I suppose is the reason it is always there. (But that doesn’t explain why the envelope remains, with a completely empty menu, when indicator-messages-service is forcibly killed.)
But non-notification functionality like that shouldn’t be in the notification area. All the arguments against “system tray abuse” by existing apps apply to “Setup Chat”: It isn’t a notification; it doesn’t say anything about any event or status.
3. The icons/spacing seems to be a bit larger than other applets, which is annoying with small screens – and looks ugly next to other applets.
I saw that the horizontal spacing between the speaker icon and envelope icon, with indicator-applet on Lucid, is quite large – quite a bit larger than the spacing between independent applets dragged next to each other.
(I also saw the new speaker icon is missing a row of pixels at the bottom when muted, on my 23-pixel high panel, which is the right height for everything else.)
Thanks for listening.
Hello there,
* After upgrading to 10.10 i’d like to thank you for fixing the transparency bug.
* Second it would be nice if Canonical would enter in discussion with users that commented on this thread. I think most of the present feedback should be valuable.
* I am doing my best to go along with the change and give it a chance. Putting my preferences for the “older ways” aside i can still this gnome-applet project is inconsistent.
For instance:
* The famous sound + envelop indicator applet. It is obviously strange to place them together.
* There is a “me-menu” with a bubble-icon and chat-related options, broadcast and Ubuntu One menus. Yet if i want to open a chat or log-in Empathy, i need to click on the envelop icon, where i again have broadcast, chat and mail options. There are two icons for one set of actions, it should be either completely split and have an icon for chat, mail and broadcast respectively or bring them under one single icon.
* Sticking together icons which aren’t inseparable is not offering the flexibility fitting the Ubuntu philosophy. I understand Ubuntu wants to follow the trend of social-media and make usage easy and preset so that users that don’t want to mess around to get the machine to work can do so without hassle. Yet the strength of Ubuntu is flexibility and customization.
In short: make this system more consistent whilst allowing complete flexibility for users. Don’t forget Ubuntu (and OS’s in general) are tools.
I am positive about Ubuntu, and want to participate as well as i can. I am after all not able to accomplish a 100th of what you guys did.
Thanks and good luck.
Forrest, a menu bar is not an axiomatic mathematical system, and vice versa. Windows 7 and Unity both have more sensible ways of minimizing a window into a small space.
Benjamin, the Air problem would be trivial for Adobe to fix, unlike the Java and Wine cases.
Jamie Lokier, the messaging menu is supposed to disappear if no applications are registered to use it. Hopefully people will implement that for Natty.
benjaming, it is indeed awkward that the messaging menu and me menu are separate. We’d love to see designs for how they could be merged.
Hi,
Got some spare time today and bumped in the original article http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/ about the notification area. This was a brilliant article and very well presented. However I have some criticism that I would like to post as a dedicated ubuntu user.
There is no doubt that the windows system tray (well, it looks like a 2D tray and it is provided by the system, so it is a suitable name to be honest) has been abused and it just becomes chaotic on the average windows system. Or one has to spent a few minutes every now and then hiding and showing icons.
In gnome’s case, things are quite more controllable and applications seem to respect the rules.
However what the article uses a “militaristic”, control freak approach. When hundreds of developers and millions of people think and use a service differently than its original purpose, this has to make the designers of the service think seriously the possibility that the users may be right and not to try to enforce a strict control at it.
Right or left click? Menu or window? Yes, it is annoying to remember each icon’s particularities, but the freedom is power and a clever things can be done. For example I have this brilliant timer applet to help me remember when my pasta or eggs are ready when I am loosing any sense of time in front of on my ubuntu screen. Just a left click to activate it, a left click to set a predefined time and done. Then when the alarm rings, a left click to dismiss it. Forcing it to follow the indicator applet standard it will require a left click, browsing the menu, left click again to start it. Same boring process to stop it. And this is only one of the potential examples.
A lot of applications are very nice to “run in the background”. True, they are not really running in the background, but the effect when they are minimised in the notification area is similar. Downloading applications, e.g. torrent apps is the most representative.
The alternative that indicator applet is presenting will just cripple all these things that users really love, in the name of a consistency that the operating system designers want to enforce.
The messaging notification is an example of a failure. Whilst till now I knew at a glance when I had an instant message from the im icon, now I have to stop my work flow and go and click it. And i am sure the list of annoyances will just grow.
I completely fail to see how forcing people to treat everything like a menu is an improvement. Menus are good to provide access to a comprehensive list of functions, but then to users benefit, developers created buttons and shortcuts and all short of useful widgets to help the user avoiding navigating a long path of menus.
Why don’t you look at the windows start menu example, a very consistent way of putting all your applications in a menu tree? In the beginning it was useful but very soon it made application launching a tedious process. Then launchers were created to quick access what you want, then microsoft added a search feature in the menu and so on. How soon before gnome-do will offer a plugin to quickly access an item from the indicator applet menus?
Of course I am exaggerating and possibly to a ridiculous point. But the bottom line is that here we have a battle between inventiveness and freedom vs consistency and control. Ubuntu’s indicator applet is too much inclined towards the left side. There are tones of good and useful things that the notification area is doing much better job.
What I would very much like to see, is a balance between freedom and control. To begin with, a good approach would be for the indicator applet to be designed to work along with the notification area rather than having to replace it. However if replacing is the strategy, it should do that by being able to accommodate the functionality that it is replacing.
Commenting on the indicator applet itself, I think that Jamie Lokier’s comments above cover almost all my complains.
What I find very hard is to try to undo all the decades of experience that say that “Context menu = Right click”. It’s been months now and I still right click on the indicator applet windows. I don’t know what is your plan to cope with this inconsistency with the rest of the desktop environment, but it is a important one.
Another confusing thing that has cost me hours on the phone is the “remove from panel” menu when right clicking. My father and my sister are both keep removing the whole indicator applet when they thing that they are just removing one of the icons. A good idea would be two clear menu entries:
* Remove this icon
* Remove all icons
Which brings me to the last part, that the user should be able to control what icons to see on the indicator applet from the indicator applet itself and not after doing detective work to find where each icon is controlled. This sounds like what microsoft’s tray does, but it could be done as part of the API itself, to notify the application that its icon is no longer welcomed on the indicator.
What I find very useful is the policy that the gnome applets follow: A section of the menu that is specific to the applet or icon and then after a separator the generic menu with “remove, move, lock”. It works and is reliable, no-matter what the applet does ,you can always remove or hide it.
I am not sure why notification are did not follow this paradigm (not involved in the development and the standards at all), it would increase its usability a lot.
I hope I did not sound very negative. Indicator applet is very young and I am optimistic that it will improve and meet users’ expectations. Just remember guy’s that one of the most important reasons that we love linux and ubuntu is the freedom and respect for the users. Customisation and choice are very important things. The way to go is to make your options quite good so that they will be preferred than the alternatives.
Thanks!
Yiannis
Yiannis, thanks for your comments. The “Remove From Panel” when right-clicking is a side-effect of the menus being implemented as a Gnome panel applet. It will be fixed in Unity.