New Unity, whitelist disabled = bad

[castrojo]

I love Unity and would absolutely hate to have to leave it. But are you saying that the panel is going to be discarded ("the systray has been deprecated since 10.04")? Where will the various indicators go — clock, unified mail, Internet, settings, users? They are still there in 13.04. Will they be moved somewhere else in 13.10?

The old systray was replaced with appindicators. The old tray was left there so app authors had time to move to appindicators:

- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExper...tionIndicators

The panel isn't going away and icons in the top right aren't going away, the way that they're written is just different and more consistent (so that they get keyboard usability, HUD integration, etc.), instead of a tray and indicators you just have indicators for everything.

The spec and code samples are mature now, the best thing to do is to point the authors of your favorite apps to the existing spec so they can implement it.

EDIT: and if they need help let me know and I can point them to developer resources to help sort them out.

[dino99]

The old systray was replaced with appindicators. The old tray was left there so app authors had time to move to appindicators:

- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExper...tionIndicators

The panel isn't going away and icons in the top right aren't going away, the way that they're written is just different and more consistent (so that they get keyboard usability, HUD integration, etc.), instead of a tray and indicators you just have indicators for everything.

The spec and code samples are mature now, the best thing to do is to point the authors of your favorite apps to the existing spec so they can implement it.

EDIT: and if they need help let me know and I can point them to developer resources to help sort them out.

Thanks again for the heads up

[Paddy Landau]

The spec and code samples are mature now, the best thing to do is to point the authors of your favorite apps to the existing spec so they can implement it.

Is this Linux-wide, or is it Ubuntu only? If it is Ubuntu only, I shall feel uncomfortable with this, as it would feel as though Canonical is dictating to the rest of the Linux community.

[Paddy Landau]

I'd like some help. I have tested 11 applications in 13.04. Please would you list any applications that I might have missed (I'll add them to this post).

I have tested the following:

DO WORK

• Caffeine
• Cuttlefish
• Deluge
• DropBox
• Redshift
• SpiderOak
• VLC

DO NOT WORK

• Keyboard Indicators (this is erratic)
• ktorrent
• TrueCrypt
• yad

I also need a reply to my question to castrojo: Is this deprecation Linux-wide or is it a unilateral decision by Canonical for Ubuntu? Because when I draft my emails to the relevant developers, I need to know how to word them. Either "Please would you adjust to the standards as described…" or "Please would you add a feature because Canonical is using a non-standard API…"

[mc4man]

In regards to vlc - the sni-qt package has produced an indicator for vlc for quite some time now (3 releases? ) - the indicator was garbage when first introduced & remains so...

[Paddy Landau]

the indicator was garbage when first introduced & remains so...

Could you be specific? I have no problems with the VLC indicator; it works perfectly for me. What problems do you have?

[castrojo]

I also need a reply to my question to castrojo: Is this deprecation Linux-wide or is it a unilateral decision by Canonical for Ubuntu? Because when I draft my emails to the relevant developers, I need to know how to word them. Either "Please would you adjust to the standards as described…" or "Please would you add a feature because Canonical is using a non-standard API…"

There's no such thing as "deprecation Linux wide" because no one can really dictate anything to anybody. It is deprecated in Ubuntu however. The spec is designed so that developers can add support for the appindicator but "fallback" to the old mode if necessary.

For most bug trackers this is a "wishlist" item, but usually if the developer has to get the app working with KDE anyway appindicators provide a nice clean way for people to do that.

[Paddy Landau]

Thanks for the reply, Castrojo.

If the developers can fall back anyway, and you are white-listing Java and Wine apps anyway, why can't we simply white list other applications? Will there come a time when Java and Wine apps no longer work?

I really don't understand.

I shall draft an email in a couple of days. But I am worried about this.

[3vi1]

KDE apps should be working, please file that as a bug (the indicators are based on KDE technology, most of the reason for moving to indicators was for a common spec that can be shared.)

I'm not sure that will get much attention from the KDE/ktorrent developers, since ktorrent works fine with KDE, and KDE still supports systray icons even without whitelisting. This Unity change only broke Unity users.

I even switched back to KDE after using Unity for 2 years, so sadly it's in the best interest of the KDE app developers to not do a thing if they want more users for KDE or other non-Unity desktops. :\

[mc4man]

Could you be specific? I have no problems with the VLC indicator; it works perfectly for me. What problems do you have?

Sure - as seen here
Clicking on the indicator should hide/unhide vlc, it doesn't.(indicators don't 'know' left from right click
The hide/unhide option never changes, always says "Hide ..." even when un-hiding
Stop, previous & next don't work, stop is sorta ok because the play option is actually play/pause.
The status icon however is fully functional, left click to hide/unhide, all the functions work including separate switching play/pause & stop, ect.
(to some extent mpris2 support makes the loss of status icons a bit more acceptable for media players...

Have returned the systray here to current unity, may be sustainable thru April release, after that maybe not.
(eventually when things are removed the effort needed to return isn't worth it or even possible.