Gnome Shell: Notes

[jff]

Testing new Gnome shell to see how productive and usable (easy to use) it is.
Sorry this may trivial question, but didn't find place for notes.
In Fedora 14 we have Gnote installed as default, but not in Fedora 15.
You can install Gnote afterwards, but you have to launch it "separately" - you can not put it to panel for example.
Is there better and handy way put small notes (widgets) in Gnome shell?
Looks like not, reference:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/FAQ#Why_aren.27t_there_applets.2C_widgets_or_gadge ts.3F

[RahulSundaram]

Hi

No. That's part of the reason why it optional now.

Ps: I am the Gnote maintainer in Fedora.

[puntarenas]

After installing F15 Alpha I was happy to see Gnote installed by default, as it is a very useful tool. At least I cannot remember I installed it manually, maybe it came as a dependency of something else?! It minimizes itself to the right side of the notifivation area now, so with a "--start-minimized" option one would be able to imitate the old behavior.

On the other hand I am asking myself why it puts itself in the notification area at all? Is that meant to be the new system tray? Wouldn't it be a much cleaner aproach to put a startup icon into the Dash (together with the upcoming "quick lists / jumplists") by default and get rid of the notification area cluttering?

[RahulSundaram]

messaging tray as it called in gnome shell is the place where system tray icons are present. Currently there is no support for jump lists and when it does, it might make sense to move functionality into that. As of now, this is the best that can be done.

[puntarenas]

Thank you for clarification and by the way kudos for your great work on Gnote. :)

It still doesn't feel right to me (and maybe just me) that the messaging tray serves for other functionality beyond messaging. For an end user who isn't regularly following developers mailing lists it is hard to find out about the overall concepts and thoughts behind these decisions, but at least I found some definition of the message tray's additional purpose on desktop-devel-list:


[...]

But:

gnome-panel applets are not exposed to the user at all in the
GNOME Shell, so they can never be the only way to do something
or the expected way to do something.

Tray icons will be displayed in GNOME Shell, but will provide
a less-than-ideal user experience. (They will be hidden in the
message tray under the assumption that they have something
to do with notifications or running tasks.)Re: Applets and GNOME 3 (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-September/msg00074.html)

However "have something to do with notifications or running tasks" is nearly all-embracing in my opinion and as beeing mentioned, jump lists will add even more redundancy. I wonder which direction this will take with upcoming gnome-shell releases.

Thanks again, keep on rockin' and no matter where to put the "tray icon functionality", Gnote is absolutely essential and highly appreciated.