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Dev Week -- Making your application shine with application indicators -- TedGould -- Wed, Jul 14th, 2010

(03:01:11 PM) tedg: I'm not sure if I'm comfortable being an "Instructor" (sounds so official), but hello everyone!
(03:01:30 PM) tedg: So this session is about Application Indicators.
(03:02:07 PM) tedg: For those who aren't familiar with them they're basically the small custom menus that are put in the panel by applications.
(03:02:34 PM) tedg: These provide extra functionality that is persistent.  Things like your music player, where you'll keep it running, but not want the full window all the time.
(03:03:03 PM) tedg: While we'd all love to have 40" screens, that's rarely practical, so we allow an easy way to do minimized status.
(03:03:27 PM) tedg: That doesn't mean that every application under the sun should have an application indicator.
(03:03:38 PM) tedg: For most it really doesn't make any sense what so ever.
(03:03:57 PM) tedg: It's rare that you'd want continuous status on your word processor for instance.
(03:04:34 PM) tedg: mpt has written up some practical guidelines on what should and shouldn't be an application indicator.
(03:04:42 PM) tedg: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CustomStatusMenuDesignGuidelines
(03:05:03 PM) tedg: That page goes into a lot more, but it starts off talking about how to think about the application indicators.
(03:05:25 PM) tedg: Our long term goal with Application Indicators is to replace the Notification Area.
(03:06:14 PM) tedg: Which, has become a usability ghetto.  Everything behaves differently, which makes them difficult to use overall.  Sure you can learn them, but really you shouldn't have to.
(03:06:33 PM) tedg: For a discussion on the notification area and application indicators there a good post on the Canonical Design Blog.
(03:06:41 PM) tedg: http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/
(03:07:09 PM) tedg: So to get to more predictability on how the icons behave, we took an opinionated tact to say that all of them are menus.
(03:07:37 PM) tedg: This provides some limitations, but it also can be a very flexible interfaces for providing rich functionality to users.
(03:09:00 PM) tedg: I just realized I wasn't in the chat room.
(03:09:03 PM) tedg: Sorry about that.
(03:09:16 PM) tedg: If people have posted questions please repost them.
(03:09:40 PM) tedg: Okay, back on track :)
(03:10:09 PM) tedg: So, how does all of this work?
(03:10:21 PM) tedg: The basis is the KDE Status Notifier Item specification.
(03:10:29 PM) tedg: http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/index.html
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