My Issues With AppIndicators

With the work I’ve been doing on my systray icons in the last few days, it occurred to me that I should probably mention that, when given the choice, I explicitly turn off Ubuntu-style AppIndicators for applications with regular systray icons.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea. I think it’s a good one. The problem is that the year is 2012 and I’m using Linux. When I left-click an icon, I expect it to toggle application visibility, not display a context menu where I have to use another click to toggle visibility. That’s reserved for right-click.

Just because Apple took so long to accept the reality of the two-button mouse doesn’t mean my Linux desktop should punish me for not using some kind of desktop widget system to glance at things like torrent status. (Though, given how many other matter-of-personal-taste apple-isms Ubuntu has been adopting, like the global menubar and the titlebar buttons on the left-hand side, it doesn’t really surprise me that they’d blindly adopt that design quirk too.)

Now, if AppIndicators gain the ability to relegate the menu to right-click and bind a window handle to left-click, I’ll be the first person to welcome consistency between different applications’ definitions of “toggle a window that’s already shown but is on another desktop or is below other windows”. (Personally, I think it should be “If the window isn’t on this desktop and top of the stack, then raise it on this desktop.”)

My Issues With AppIndicators by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.