Right click menu for indicator-applet and more!

[Dylan McCall]

Hi,


There is a usability issue with indicator-applet in Lucid that I
consider _very_ serious.

First of all, there is no drag handle for the applet, but the applet's
contents are unpredictable. It is possible for the applet to have
nothing in it, in which case it cannot be controlled or seen by the
user. I'm not sure if it is documented, but I think the convention here
is that an applet of this type has a handle (added via the
PANEL_APPLET_HAS_HANDLE flag). See the window list and existing
notification area applets for examples.

Now, to the meat of this issue: this applet is meant to replace the
notification area, preferably as quietly as possible. Any user used to
the notification area will right click items in there to get their
menus. In my bug report [1] I use Rhythmbox as an example:

Joe wishes to exit Rhythmbox, so he right clicks what looks like the
notification area icon for it (but is actually the indicator applet),
pauses for a moment, then clicks "Remove from Panel." Fast forward a few
minutes: "Where did my volume go? How much battery life do I have?
What's going on?!"

[1] I filed this as a bug report (with a possible fix) at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-applet/+bug/519553

In my fix, I still have indicator-applet specifically only react to a
button 1 press, but it returns True instead of False so nothing else
will touch the button press event either. I did this because, while it
acting just like a normal menu would be beautiful (and a direction to
pursue when we do something about gnome-panel), it would be inconsistent
with all the other applets. The trained behaviour could cause the same
problem I describe here except for other applets instead, where users
may expect a right click to open the main menu as normal.

This is sort of a compromise. The user won't get the misleading menu,
the indicator icon only seems to hold a single menu, but he must left
click all the time. As for the applet menu, that goes on the applet's
handle bar. (And only there).

There is obviously some room for debate with this. That is why I'm
here :)
What do you think?



Thanks,
Dylan