Notification bar icon and allow closing to it

[Stephen Ostrow]

It would be great to have this application be able to close to the notification area.

Right click for options of play, next, stop, love, ban, etc would be helpful.

This would make it so it didn't matter what workspace it was opened on

[Stephen Ostrow (isleshocky77)]

Was going to make the importance of this as wishlist, but it appears only you can edit that field. Just wanted to say thanks for a great application and I'll be looking into how gnome handles it's notification bar and see if I can be of some help on this one when I get some time.

[Kevin Mehall (kevin-mehall)]

That's somewhat of an abuse of the notification area. I know several apps do it, but that's not the purpose of the notification area and it creates significant usability problems.

See also: http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?219-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-3-there-s-no-tray-icon-in-gnome

The rationale is that the notification area is not intended to be a substitute for the window manager and tasklist. However, the default tasklist fails at effectively managing these sorts of occasional-interaction background applications. As far as I know, Gnome Shell still does not fix this.

I hacked libwnck22 to shrink "show on all desktops" windows to a small icon on the left of the panel, like Chrome's pin tab feature. It's posted at http://blog.kevinmehall.net/2010/bringing_pin_tab_to_wnck
Currently, I'm using a panel applet I wrote that works similarly, but is also capable of launching the programs if they are not currently running. DockbarX, Talika, and Windows 7 work similarly, but mine only takes over control of specified windows, so it's designed to complement the default taskbar, rather than replace it. There seems to be interest, so I'm going to clean it up and post it soon.

Also, Ubuntu is deprecating the notification area in favor of their indicator menus. The indicator menu similarly does not seem like the proper place to minimize things, despite the fact that several apps (e.g. rhythmbox) use it as such. In my opinion, it's worse, because it's another click to restore the window.

I'm not completely opposed to an optional notification icon or indicator menu for Pithos, but have no immediate plans to implement it myself.

[Stephen Ostrow (isleshocky77)]

I've read all the articles and bug comments stating similar to what you've said above and in some areas do agree with it. However, like you said right now and in the near future there is no similar convenient solution. Evolution, Rhythmbox, Pidgin, etc. all do a pretty good job of being able to be maintained whether they be part of the indicator applet or the notfication area.

As stated above if I get some free time I would love to try getting my hands dirty in some of that stuff and could probably look into seeing if I could get something similar rhythmbox setup.

The other option I saw mentioned which would also be awesome is just to be able to integrate Piano as a rhythmbox plugin. But that would probably have nothing to do with pithos.

[Vince Spicer (hacked)]

I built a simple statusicon with a context menu. Currently the only menu buttons are next songand play/pause. I just checked my changes into my branch, and I am running the code.

I read some the arguments above, but still think a media player should have the ability to minimize to a tray icon.

[Vince Spicer (hacked)]

I just pushed in some cleanup and added love/ban/tired to the context menu.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hacked/pithos/main/revision/67