Loaded without an issue, Showed up in the system tray after installation. No need to reboot. However its not clear what its function is. Also bug-tracker is missing.

Showed up in the system tray after installation. No need for reboot. However, it is not clear what its function is. Also no bug-tracker

• Bug-tracker missing
• as others have mentioned, no info about the 'reboot' requirement
• -1

Needs a bugtracker, a better description and a notice telling the user that a restart is required should be also added.

Needing restart after installation will make some users uninstall it before attempt a restart. Better description is also a must. Other then that it works as expected. Although commonly used, I don't think system tray fits at all in Fremantle interface. It's a quick and dirty solution for quick porting of course, but to be honest, I personally consider it just a necessary evil in GNOME and would consider it annoying on Fremantle.

BTW I've not encountered Uwe's bug, I've not rebooted and all seems to work well.

It has taken a lot for me to understand how this works, but finally all is clear. ;) Well, there should be a sort of list where you can read which programs use the notification area. Until now, I only know Pidgin, and I even don't like how it works with it.

However, I can understand this could be useful for others: it just needs a better (and exhaustive) description. I've never used a tablet before, so I didn't know what a notification area is.

I think there needs a bit more about what notifications are shown in the system tray..

There should be a hint that a reboot is necessary after the installation. When I installed this other items in the status area disappear. Also the notification panel itself does not came up until I did a reboot.

I like the idea but to be honest the practical implementation isn't that nice. Either you should wrap tray icons somehow and arrange them like status plugins or put them somewhere else on the screen. In my opinion something inside a menu defeats the purpose of a tray icon.

I have changed my opinion about user/ visiblity and being a depency of other packages. Because statusmenu widgets cannot be disabled (except by uninstalling), forcing installation of this package for example with pidgin would be bad. I for example wouldn't like systray to take one spot from statusmenu, but would still like to use pidgin for IRC.

So only better description is needed.

@Gabriel: this is not the point to pontificate on Fremantle Hildon Desktop design choices, so you are - in effect - wasting your breath there. maemo-developers might be more constructive.

As for "users will have to find [this] themselves" this is why it is critical for there to be a good description here, and possibly a reference to it in Pidgin's too.

If this package is only supposed to be a dependency of other apps, please don't put it into the user/* category.

I don't believe we have any mechanism of revealing to the user if a given package A /recommends/ or /suggests/ a package B, right? Thus, the user pretty much has to figure out on her own that she needs this package.

In GNOME, the system tray is a gnome-panel plugin shipped with the GNOME panel package, and configured by most distributions to be present on the GNOME panel by default.

In Windows, users have a system tray whether they like it or not.

For applications originating in the desktop world, this means that there's a good chance there'll be a system tray present. Having one in Maemo will make porting such applications easier. Too bad it's not turned on by default.

OK, I can change the description.

I believe that the package should be a dependency only for those packages that absolutely fail to work without a system tray. Pidgin will work without a system tray, but, for example, closing the buddy list window will quit Pidgin. Not good, especially if you're used to Pidgin on the desktop, where it has a system tray icon.

The system tray should never have been a package on its own, but during the development of Fremantle nobody thought about providing a place for system tray icons. In Diablo and Chinook, the developer of hildon-desktop was kind enough to build this fd.o standard in as an alternative to status area plugins.

In Fremantle, this standard has been ignored completely. In fact, I've had some success recently making a floating window into a system tray, which could address the basic requirement for a system tray - a requirement that's missing from hildon-systray-0.0.1: That system tray icons should always be visible /and/ clickable. Unfortunately, such a floating window would interfere with everything else on the desktop. This has simply not been considered.

Thus, I am faced with having to try different ways of implementing this standard, while dodging the existing desktop. But hey, I want to see system tray icons in Fremantle, so I'll keep trying. Hmmm ... I wonder ... what about hinting the window as a panel window ....