Ubuntu – the difference between indicators and a system tray

designindicatorusability

What is so new about indicators?

What did we have before?

Are there technical or usability differences?

Best Answer

Indicators is a project of the Ayatana team, focussed on usability and design. The indicators they have invisioned to replace the traditional "system tray" have the following goals:

  • Support for KDE and GNOME

    • That means that developers only have to do the work once. Which is rather nice.

  • Creating a space for innovation

    • The most obvious example is the messaging menu, which unifies email, irc instant messaging, and ("Your App Here") into a consise menu that will always behave in the same way

  • Cleaning up the clutter

    • many applications put up indicators for various reasons - and not always good ones. Indicators make it easy to combine various tasks into a single indicator, leaving the user with a clean indication area, where they actually understand what everything does.

  • Accessibility

    • there were some accessibility problems with the old system, with indicators they can be addressed. (An example: some system tray applications would paint their window in a weird way such that screen-readers weren't able to read their text)

You might be interested in the Canonical Design Blog and the Ayatana Project.

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