Tale of a little pixel

Systray finally in action

As Aaron noted, the client library for the new system tray specification has finally landed in kdelibs, as "experimental" (i.e. it will probably still see some refactoring for 4.4, assuring is as good as possible)

And is important also from the user perspective because another cool thing happened: some applications that will be shipped alongside KDE 4.3 have already been ported to the new protocol (thanks to Davide and Aaron for that :). They are: Kmix, Krandrtray (quick screen resolution changer),Kwallet (save the passwords) and korgac (appointments reminder for Korganizer)

Of course the quickest way to show what is the difference between the old and the new is with a quick video:

Ogg version

It shows the main charateristics: the pretty plasma tooltips and mouseover effects (you would get and those things even with say a gtk app that is using this protocol). Also the ability to show an icon in more than one system tray (think about multiple monitors) or having multiple system trays that shows different categories (or to hide some of them if you don't care about them)

RE: plasma-applets vs tray icons

Totally agree with you.

I've always figured palsma as some kink of universal system tray. Each application should/could propose its own plasma applet which the user can enable to provide the same services as a system tray icon would provide.

With that vision, I did remove the system tray from my (minimalist) desktop, but I miss a kmix plasmoid

Cheers

Sent from Benjamin (Anonimous) on 09/08/2009 at 19:54:37

looking sharp

loving it. especially mouse over feedback

mart I'm glad the desktop layout will get some love. don't forget to account for the new notifications icon. they dont like each other too much right now on the desktop. :P

knue, I use embed window plasmoid to embed KMix on a desktop activity, if you can't wait. it may be in playground. (if embed-win could configure to auto run the app it should embed it would be even better though. still useful)

Sent from peaches (Anonimous) on 08/05/2009 at 1:53:26

plasma-applets vs tray icons

Hi,

I really wonder weather it would be a better idea to make things like kmix and krandrtray a plasma-applet. Is there a reason to keep this in the systemtray? Kwallet really makes sense to live there but many things not.

Sent from knue (Anonimous) on 06/05/2009 at 20:38:18

Re:

@vide: at the moment it auto resizes only in the panel, it needs some more love in the desktop

@Anon: scroll wheel is supported, drag and drop still not, not excluded a limited support for it won't be added in the future tough

Sent from MArco Martin (mart) on 06/05/2009 at 17:57:21

Hiding categories

Why when icons are hidden the systray is left empty and not resized automagically? is it a bug or a feature? :)

Sent from Vide (Anonimous) on 06/05/2009 at 15:21:07

jobs

can it show Steve's Jobs ?

Sent from anonymouse (Anonimous) on 06/05/2009 at 15:08:12

Cool!

Excellent stuff! In KDE3's basket, there are a couple of things that I really like about its System Tray integration, and wonder if they will be preserved?

1) Moving the scroll-wheel over the system tray icon cycles through the available Baskets; and

2) One can drag files, pictures etc onto the system tray icon and the file/ picture will be added to the current Basket.

Will these features be possible under the new scheme?

Also, I wonder if it is possible to embed arbitrary Plasmoids into the system tray? For example, one could have a Klipper Plasmoid and have the exact same Plasmoid available on the desktop, in the panel or as a tiny system tray icon. This would also allow one to write more "interactive" system tray icons now that Qt4's system tray is no longer a QWidget.

Sent from Anon (Anonimous) on 06/05/2009 at 14:37:29