Comment 23 for bug 391056

On Mon, 2009-11-30 at 13:10 +0000, Andrea Cimitan wrote:
> 2009/11/30 Cyberkilla <email address hidden>:
> >
> > For instance, you'd have a useful - but unintrusive - single docklet icon...
> > When you click on the icon, the tray icons would slide in, just as the weather forecast does.
> >
> The purpose of notification area icons is to have them always visible,
> if you hide them then they become useless :)

Well, the notification area has been consistently abused and has moved
from the original concept (transient notifications) to an
easy-to-implement, cross-DE panel integration area. For example,
applications like Banshee, Rythmbox, Transmission, etc do *not* belong
to the notification area - yet there they are. (Email notifications on
the other hand, do).

Andrea's idea is very similar to the approach taken by Windows 7, which
works surprisingly well (there, I said it!) Windows has always had the
"tray icon proliferation" issue that has started to affect our
notification areas. Their solution was to add a single "notification
button" to their dock (sorry, taskbar), which displays notifications in
a pop-up bubble once clicked. The user can also configure notifications
as "always visible" (outside the bubble) or "always hidden" (inside the
bubble).

For the shake of discussion, I'd propose a similar system only taken one
step further: notifications demanding attention should be promoted from
the bubble onto docky automatically. Everything else should appear
either in the bubble or onto docky, depending on a per-icon preference
(default is in the bubble, except for specific important icons like
battery or network manager).

How does this sound? I can provide mockup screenshots if necessary.