Ubuntu to kill its notification area (system tray)

Ubuntu will soon begin to phase out its traditional "system tray" in favor of a new overhauled menu and notification system. Citing inconsistent behavior and weak notification ability, the Canonical Design Team has announced that the current notification area will be dropped in favor of more consistent and user friendly status menus.

The problem: A weak and inconsistent notification area.

To explain its decision, the team went back to the origins of the current notification area that many operating systems incorporate. Originally conceived in Windows 95, the notification area began its life as a place to see the time and adjust the volume, but soon started to become known as the “system tray” as Microsoft allowed developers to use “systray.exe" for their own applications.

As much as Microsoft has tried to dispel the term “system tray” in favor of “notification area", the Ubuntu team cite two main reasons for it still being used. The first, as stated above, developers are able to use the notification area for uses that aren’t even notifications (such as hiding an application to its tray icon). For the second, they state that the use of extremely small icons do not effectively alert the user other than small case scenarios such as “you have new mail” or “your battery charge is at 10%”. Continue http://asurl.net/etZ