Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Bugzilla Roundup #1 (Fuzzy Matching and Tray Icons)

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 18:13 +1100, James Livingston wrote:
> 
> My personal take on the close-minimises-to-tray policy is that the
> window already has a button to minimise Rhythmbox, so why do we want
> the
> close button to do that as well? However I know there are a lot of
> people who think differently.
> 
> There have been quite a few people asking why Rhythmbox has moved to
> close-button-minimises policy, when other Gnome applications don't do
> this. In addition the package maintainer for one distro has said they
> they are considering patching their packages to reverse this, if we
> leave it in.

Apart from the funky overblown ideas of splitting RB into a front-end
and a backend (how do you communicate between the 2? What happens when
you break your soft ABI? More problems than it's worth IMO), the
discussion is mainly around the music as a service.

The minimise to tray (although I was the first to be skeptical about
this) is because RB wants to be a desktop service: it plays your music.

iTunes on MacOS X solves this problem in a different way. The iTunes
windows are views (you can open plenty of them), and the iTunes
application doesn't quit when the last window is closed. Because GNOME/X
don't have an "application" paradigm, we can't do that.

What I would do:
- get rid of the tray icon, it clashes with 3rd-party applications like
the RB applet (I personally only use it to bring up the RB window, and
the nice notification telling me the window has changed).
- make RB not close (still running in the background) but hide the
window when the close button is pressed. Launching RB again (most people
would have it in their panel or somesuch) will just show the window in
the existing instance again.

The main problem with that being that the user would need to know that
closing doesn't really close (ha! that old one), but the quit item in
the menu will.

The behaviour isn't that different from today's, and will allow third-
party applications to fill in the gap for the rest.

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
"The Derby players have seen more of his balls than the one they're
meant to be playing with" - Brian Clough, on a streaker who once
interrupted a Derby County-Manchester United match.