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Comment by donaq | Hacker News Reader

Oy, but I like being able to minimize my rhythmbox, tweetdeck and pidgin to the notification area. :(

I'll suspend judgement till I actually use whatever they come up with though.

How about being able to minimize ANY application and dragging it to the system tray. This way you wont have to wait for each app to implement this, reduce code bloat, and the rest of us wont have to wonder:

  * Why isn't this app in the taskbar?

  * What does close window do for this app?

  * What does minimize do for this app?

  * What does file quit do?

I implemented something very similar (albeit slightly less slick) for the GNOME panel. It works nicely.

http://blog.kevinmehall.net/2010/bringing_pin_tab_to_wnck

This is literally my first time hearing about pin tab in chrome. Behind the curve entirely. Thank you.

Yes, that would be very nice.

Nice idea. The top-right icons (at least, in XP) could be (from right to left): x to close, window to maximise, line to minimise to taskbar, and a dot (in a square) to minimise to the system tray.

Applications could then act differently based on where they were minimised - e.g., icon animations to convey a message, can't steal window focus, can show little alerts/messages, etc.

KDE allows this on a per application or per window basis "skip taskbar" and "skip pager". Sadly I don't think you can have alt-tab overlook such skipped pages.

Huh. I think this is the first time I've considered the possibility that there are people who actually like those notification icons. I always figured they were just the product of egotistical developers who each think their own application deserves my attention more than the others.

Personally, I hate when applications like rhythmbox crowd the notification area. There is no event involving rhythmbox that I will ever want to be notified of. "I'm still playing that song. Still playing. Still playing. OK, now it's over." Gee, thanks. I figure if an application has nothing new to tell me, it should stay over in the taskbar with all the other ones.

But indeed, a notification icon can do things that a taskbar entry can't. Notably, the context menu in the taskbar is defined by the taskbar, not the application, so things that take one step with a notification icon take two or more via the taskbar.

So now I think the problem isn't the notification area, it's the taskbar. Maybe if the taskbar worked better, developers wouldn't pollute the notification area so much.

Stuff in the notification area also takes up less space. If I have a few things running all the time, I don't have to devote half of the task bar to them.

They already have solutions for this: Rhythmbox will be integrated into the volume widget and pidgin and tweetdeck/other twitter apps in the MeMenu. it's really far more elegant, I think.

That's because you've happened to grow accustomed to the misdesigned concept of "minimizing applications to tray". The fact that it's been part of graphical user interfaces for some time and mostly gone unquestioned doesn't mean it's good design.

Huh? How can something that improves usability be bad design? I've grown accustomed to it because it helps me.

It improves usability for you, perhaps largely because you've internalized the mental model that it instills ("there are two places to minimize applications to: one is the regular task list, and the other is this tray thing"). That doesn't mean it doesn't ruin usability for lots of other people, especially those new to computing.

You mistake effect for cause. I internalized that mental model because that UI paradigm improved usability. To clarify, the improvement in usability stems from being able to not clutter my task bar with long-lived apps that I'm not actively switching back and forth from (like music players and contact lists of IMs). In the absence of statistics supporting your case, I'm assuming it's the same for most other people who use that feature. As for new users, no one stays new forever, and it seems counter-productive to abandon increased functionality because it might confuse what will by definition always be a minority segment of users (or because some group of designers thinks so).

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