New notification area problems

[Benjamin Humphrey]

See attached image.

The new notification area in Lucid has two issues. Spacing and applet behavior.

The notification area now takes up almost a whole 1/4 of my top panel. For those of us who don’t like having two panels and want their window list up the top, it leaves hardly any room to show open windows.

Just look at the spacing around the Rhythmbox icon, you could drive a bus through there!

The current panel spacing is bad because:

It uses up too much of your top panel
It is inconsistent compared with the rest of the theme
It is inconsistent with other items on the panel*

* Compare the gap between Rhythmbox and the volume icon with the gap between the wireless network icon and Pidgin.

Another thing that’s flawed about this new notification area is the fact that each item isn’t an individual applet. For example, say I want to remove the Messaging menu because I don’t like it or don’t use it. This is actually a fairly plausible scenario, many people don’t use Evolution because they prefer webmail services such as Gmail. Also, many people use Pidgin instead of Empathy because, well, because Pidgin is just better. So in this scenario, pretty much 75% of the functionality of the messaging menu is now useless.

My only option is to remove the entire notification applet, so I lose Rhythmbox, the battery status indicator, and the volume indicator. (For some reason the wireless applet is separate.)

Solution? You could either separate all of the applets into individual ones, but I think the best way would be to logically group them into “system status” and “applications.”

For example, in the “system status” area you could have things that tell you information:

Battery indicator
Wireless indicator
Volume indicator
Crash report notification
Updates available
CPU Scaling

And in the “applications” area you could have a tray-like section that has stores the icons for applications while they are running:

Rhythmbox
Messaging Menu
Pidgin
Desktop Drapes
Banshee
Transmission
etc

This is just one possible idea for a solution.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.

[Someone in time (stevengm77)]

Well I found a solution for the sound indicator applet, but it's quite stupid handle a simple think like this with a different method. What I did was to include in the "Startup programs" this line:

gnome-volume-control-applet &

That was a solution what i found in Ubuntu Forums...

Good luck...