Fleshing out the Gnome Shell Message Tray

My project for this summer will be to add functionality and general coolness to the message tray of Gnome Shell. Things like integrating music players and e-mail, and figuring out how to manage IM conversations in the tray.

Bugs with patches waiting

• Split the tray icon manager - handed over to Dan for xembed stuff

• Add symbolic icon support - waiting on Owen's feedback

• Add background images to notifications - needs rebasing

• Patch to Rhythmbox to use the background images and icon buttons

• Make icon buttons opt-in

Goals

• Improve notifications

  • Add background images [patch here]

  • Add icon buttons [needs fixing and a design solution here]

• Status Icons (non system) to the tray [WIP]

  • 

  • Icons split to the tray (created statusIconDispatcher class to handle where new icons are displayed)
    • Icons are their own windows, so the hover state doesn't get tracked by clutter automatically

• Allow combined notifications

  • Redo how notifications are handled
    • Associate immediately with a source, each source gets its own notification queue
    • Add little counter to source icons with number of queued messages
      • Display source's whole message queue in one popup, allowing focus to change between popups and sorted by urgency

Blog Posts

• Week 3 - Splitting the tray

• Week 2 - Getting used to things

• Week 1 - Intro

Things I'm Using

Both for my reference and yours, here are some of the pages with designs related to what I'm trying to implement:

• Message Tray

• System Status

• Bug dealing with improvements to the message tray

• Message tray Mockups