Comment 335 for bug 332945

My problems with that solution, Paulo J. S. Silva, are that A) you're essentially just replacing the notification area with the indicator applet, and B) messages in the indicator applet aren't as visible and therefore are more likely to go unnoticed than the regular notification area icon. From what I've seen, the indicator applet is currently a bit of a joke. Granted, I don't use Evolution, but I had never seen the indicator applet at all until I decided to set up Pidgin to get on IRC. Suddenly, I have a strange new icon that looks like an envelope. It doesn't seem to indicate that I've received a message -- though the notification OSDs do so nicely. In fact, all it seems to actually do is to tell me I have Pidgin open -- which I already know, since I have Pidgin open! Even if I minimize it, it's there in the program list.

It seems to me that the indicator applet is just a more compact version of the notification area applet, and I don't see how it's going to be any better as a solution. I personally believe it would be worse, if for no other reason that the one I stated above. If people believe that the notification area is broken now, they'll be saying the same thing about the indicator applet once every application is spamming it with useless messages. The simple fact is that a notification area icon is a visible, persistent, non-intrusive form of notification, and a notification OSD is a visible, transient, non-intrusive form of notification. Why can't we simply use a combination of these two existing forms of notification for -- guess what! -- notifying the user of updates? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And considering that the only icons I ever regularly see in my notification area are the Network Manager applet, Power Manager applet, Bluetooth applet, and Update Manager applet, I still don't see how it's "broken".