Message Tray Updates

Status: In progress

Description

One of the prominent features of gnome-shell from the beginning was the message tray. To address some of the interaction drawbacks of the existing implementation / design, a few changes have been proposed. These are outlined in GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/MessageTray.

Owner

Marina Zhurakhinskaya

Involved Parties

Ana Risteska (Outreach Program for Women intern)

Affected modules: gnome-shell

Current Status

Some patches are starting to land.

The planned changes are being tracked in following bugs:

677210 Don't show the message tray background when a banner pops up
677215 Trigger the tray with downward pressure, not hot corner
677213 Restyle the message tray
677216 Don't time out banners when the user is inactive
657278 Remove chats after all read and inactive for a while
669508 online/away/offline/away/online is too much
652752 don't pop up under the pointer
657277 don't lose messages
679809 Close buttons on expanded notifications and bubbles

Maybe not this cycle:

677217 Separate expanded notifications from the screen edge, queue new notifications beneath them

Ana recently posted an update about improved presence indication.

Most of the improvements are included in the 3.5.90 release.

Bugs

Most of this feature has now landed. Here are related bugs:

High priority:

First tray item is always selected when opening with super+M, keynav is broken	done
Focusing the text entry doesn't force expanded chat banners to stay open	done
Legacy tray items don't have a context menu any more	done
On-screen keyboard notification doesn't work with new message tray	to do

Lower priority:

Super+M should close the tray as well as open it	to do
Focused window blinks when the pointer moves over a notification	done
Close buttons on tray bubbles shouldn't remove the message source	to do
Close button positioning - should be lower and to the left	done
We still don't have a solution for legacy tray icons	to do
Non-square tray items, insufficient horizontal padding	done
Pointer over notifications is not recognized when moving in sideways	done
Increase the opacity of the message tray lightbox	done
Close buttons overlap the screen edge	done
Make the message tray less prominent in the overview	done
Message badges need restyling	done
vmware icon appears to be stretched in new message tray	to do

How to Help

Contact Marina, Ana or Debarshi - or attach patches to any of the above bugs