One thing that kept bothering me in the GNOME UI Hackfest was how little data applications export out to the desktop. As I was in the shell group we were discussing various things that we wanted to do and John Mccann kept having to remind me not to worry about the implementation as I would get frustrated that we simply didn't have the data. I want to fix this. I want to have the data in a structured way.

What I've come to realize is that we need to let applications be applications, let panels be panels and let applets be applets. With the notification area specification we created a way for applications to break through this barrier and put a little segment of the application into the panel. While this sounds great, and it has created a quick way to prototype some interesting ideas, it's also created a complete mess in our panels. There is no consistency of action nor in look for that section of the panel. I like to call the notification area the "bag of crap." While it's created a way for applications to innovate, it's drastically stalled innovation for panels and shells.

What I'd like to put forward is the idea of little flags that applications can hold up to say what they're thinking or doing, which I'm going to call indicators. The application can then represent in a structured way that it's got something of interest to the desktop as a whole, and then the desktop can represent that to the user. How ever it likes. It's not the application's responsibility to figure out how to do this, or if it needs to be done in a single place or multiple, or anything other than raising the flag. While I think that this might frustrate application developers at first in that they don't have control over the display of this information, I think that long term it will empower them in that they don't have to fiddle with this type of interaction any more.

First off I want to build something simple (start small, think big), the messaging indicator, which will mostly consist of a GNOME panel applet. It will do simple things like represent IMs and e-mail and not a lot more, but the real goal is starting to get applications like Evolution and Pidgin to export this information. Once we're there, then we can start to look at new ways to use it. I love the idea of having the Evolution icon having the number of unread messages a la Apple or Gwibber also putting messages in the messaging indicator. Those are all next steps, but I think important ones in starting to explore how we can get data out of the applications and to the users in usable and attractive ways.


posted Jan 6, 2009 | permanent link