On KDE 4.6 panel

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, February 3, 2011, you wrote:
> Hi Aaron,
> 
> Thank you, for for KDE SC 4.6, and it's panel auto-hiding sensibility
> (I'm hoping you have fixed the always-hide nuisance from git logs). I

yep; i have one more set of changes i want to do to make the autounhiding even 
more intelligent, but things are working fairly well again.

> always set panel to auto-hide and hopes that it will spring up once a
> window wants my attention. 4.6 brings me great joy.

:)
 
> I'd also like panel to auto-rise when something in system tray wants
> my attention (most common use case is that somebody pinged me on
> Pidgin and the systray icon blinks but I see it after an hour because
> that's when I check my hidden panel). I'd be glad to prepare some
> patches if you could give some pointers on what to/where to change, OR
> if its not a good idea at all.

that actually already works .. if the app uses Status Notifiers. apps that use 
the old xembed method will never be able to work properly. this is because the 
xembed system (which Pidgin still uses, as most gtk+ apps do) provides zero 
usable information for this. Status Notifiers are metadata rich, however, 
including the ability to set their status :)

Canonical has adopted them, we use them (i hope so: we invented them), there's 
a well formed and published specification[1] .. all that's needed is for 
Pidgin developers to start using it. there's even a library from Canonical 
that makes this easy to do.

i don't know about Canonical's library, but at least the KDE support for 
status notifiers is backwards compatible with old xembed style trays (so, e.g. 
gnome desktop, gnome-shell, etc) so there is zero downside to an app using 
them.

p.s. i hope you don't mind that i cc'd the pidgin developer list on the reply.

[1] http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/ .. we're waiting for 
freedesktop.org accounts to come in for the devs so it can be added there.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/attachments/20110203/d17462d7/attachment.sig>