The Gnome 3 notification area

The Gnome 3 developers have made a conscious decision to get away from the old system tray, where everything but the kitchen sink ended up: program icons, the weather, the time, a volume control, a network manager, email notifications, instant messenger chat notifications, music players...
Gnome 3 has three separate areas where the same things can go, with a rationale for each: running applications in the dash on the left, system settings in the system tray at the top right, and notifications at the bottom of the screen.
It's not a perfect taxonomy. If a music player is running, why can't you see what it's playing and control it from the dash? Does it really belong in the notification area.
But it's a taxonomy I'm willing to go along with. Gnome users, however (who are revolting) are not. They want to put the program icons, the weather, email notifications, instant messenger chat notifications, music players and probably the kitchen sink back in the panel.
There's a Gnome 3 extension to notify the arrival of emails, but it appears in the panel, not in the notification area, where the new paradigm says it should be. Another email notifier, Mailnag, appears in the notification area, where the paradigm says it should be.
I used it in Fedora, but unfortunately Debian Wheezy doesn't have some of the requirements yet, so it doesn't work. [Update: It works with the installation of some required dependencies- the requirements listed on the Mailnag page are available in the Debian repository but with different names.]
One problem with the new notification area is that notifications are visible for only a few seconds before either disappearing or being moved to the persistent notification area at the bottom right of the screen, which the user has to actively invoke: if you've popped out of the room to make a cup of tea, you're not going to see that new email notification.
There's another Gnome extension that keeps notifications in the message tray until clicked. But using it means that notifications of transient events, for example a song change, will not behave in a rational way: they will remain until clicked.
The obvious answer would be for some notifications to remain until dismissed (new email, IM) and other not. It will be interesting to see how the Gnome developers respond to the issue. Personally I hope they can find an elegant solution within the new paradigm: I'm not one who is inclined to try to recreate the old system tray in my top panel.

Ubuntu's notification area 2

It's not hard to see where the inspiration comes from for the new Ubuntu panel design- and particularly the notification area.
Clean, elegant, organised, functional, predictable, consistent...
...and grey.
Apple OS X of course.

Here are the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx notification area and the Apple OSX Leopard notification area for comparison:






Here for comparison is a standard Gnome notification area:




Untidy, scruffy disorganised, unpredictable, individualistic.... and colourful.
For some reason, I actually prefer the standard Gnome notification area.
But I'll just have to get used to a new notification area regime eventually: Gnome 3 is moving in the same direction:

Destop design (1995-2010)

I've mentioned recently how I like to minimise applications like music players to the notification area, and talked about alternative method of minimising to an icon- using a dock.
Now I learn that Ubuntu is set to kill its notification area.
I quite like the old system of minimising documents to the taskbar and putting running applications in the "notification area"- system which apparently originated with Windows 95 (although the "abuse" of the notification area to hold any old application came from third-parties, not MS).
How to avoid running applications in the notification area? I learnt recently that a lot of Ubuntu users have applications like music players running full screen on a different desktop and simply switch desktops. Seems like a good solution, but I've never really got into using more than one desktop.
I recently came across a way to see what's running on different desktops and switch between them, using Compiz and the "Windows" key. The keyboard short-cuts Super (aka the Windows key) + W brings up all desktops and shows what's running. It seems there are a lot of useful Compiz keyboard short-cuts I never knew about.
The way the short-cut worked reminded me of the Gnome 3 shell, which I've been trying out recently- clicking on Activities in the shell opens a window with the desktop or desktops, plus a panel menu.
As a way of organising open applications, I'm going to try having four desktops, and running one application full screen on each desktop. For somebody who has been using the taskbar and notification area for so long, it'll be a case of teaching an old dog new tricks, but with any luck the dog is not yet too old to learn.
The Gnome 3 shell is due for release in September 2010.

Ubuntu's notification area

Here's a quick comparison of the behaviour of Rhythmbox and Banshee when "closed" to the notification area. Rhythmbox adopts Ubuntu's new code of practice for how applications should behave, and Banshee doesn't.

Action/Behaviour	Rhythmbox	Banshee
Hover	Nothing	Mini-player appears with album art, track and title information, play time, and play bar with manipulatable grabber.
Left-click	Show Rhythmbox menu, including current track and album, with option to display Rhythmbox full screen.	Open Banshee.
Right-click	Show applet menu.	Show Banshee menu- play, next, shuffle etc.

I have to say I prefer Banshee's behaviour. I can get the information I want about the current track just by hovering. I can open Banshee with one click. And if I want the menu information, I can get it with a right-click.

With Rhythmbox, I've lost he ability to send the application to the notification area with one click and I've lost the ability to get information about the playing track by hovering .

The new specification for the Ubuntu notification area originally said that music players didn't belong there, and Rhythmbox simply quit on hitting the close button- the only option was to minimise it to the taskbar.

I like to keep the taskbar for documents I'm looking at as much as possible, so I didn't like Rhythmbox being there. If the taskbar is not to full, it's possible to see what's playing, but to control play maximising Rhythmbox was the only option- with the annoying risk of hitting the close button and quitting the program afterwards.

Fortunately Ubuntu seems to have relented and allowed music players back in the notification area.

(No such redemption for the update notification, which now appears- and gets lost- in the taskbar. It was a lot more noticeable in the notification area, and seemed to belong there more naturally.)

I like to send applications that run in the background to the notification area on hitting the close button- Transmission is another example, and again I preferred the behaviour of the icon before it adhered to the new code of practice.

Action/Behaviour	New	Old
Hover	Nothing	Show transfer rates up and down.
Left-click	Open Transmission menu.	Open Transmission.
Right-click	Show applet menu.	Open Transmission menu.

Of course there are good reasons for these changes. Previously icons in the notification area were arbitrary interfaces used for arbitrary purposes, with different and confusing behaviour.

Having looked at all the good reasons for the changes, I much preferred my old icons with their arbitrary interfaces. I liked being able to restore applications with one click, and to hover with my mouse and get information I need.

Sadly these useful features seem to have gone out of the window in the name of progress.

I can only hope that when the transition to the new specification is complete, the advantages of consistency will shine through, and we'll look back at the previous notification area and see it as a dog's breakfast, rather than remember it with nostalgia.