Ubuntu�s Indicator Menus � Ayatana bearing fruit

“When we set up Project Ayatana to improve the usability of the
whole desktop, we called it Ayatana because we were focused on the
“sphere of consciousness”, one’s awareness of what’s going on
outside of the current application. There are two key aspects to
the work:

“1. Notifications are “awareness distilled” in the sense that
you cannot interact with them at all. We designed them as ephemeral
“click-transparent” messages, implemented in Notify-OSD. Their sole
purpose is to notify you of transient events.

“2. Indicator Menus combine persistent awareness of a state with
a set of options for modifying that state.

“In this blog I’ll outline the arc of our work on indicator
menus to date, and the trajectory we expect it to follow. We’re
about a year into the effort, all told, and I think it will take
another 18 months before we can consider it baked. It should be
done by 12.04 LTS. This is an iterative process, and things are in
flux right now. I hope, when we are happy that we can commit to ABI
stability, that Gnome and KDE will adopt the work too. For the
moment, the rapid pace of evolution has meant that we’re depending
on fantastic upstreams to keep up with us as things move.”

Complete
Story