GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 368174
Main window close button doesn't quit application
Last modified: 2008-04-29 17:13:52 UTC
One of the greater mysteries in life is why some applications, especially IM applications, have their main window close button redefined to mean "minimize to tray icon" instead of "quit application". Up until recently, Gossip had this right. "Close" in the title bar means "Quit" (like in almost every other appliction known to man) and if you wanted to hide the main window and only keep the notifiaction area icon you had some other means to do so. Why, oh why, did this change? :)
Hurmph... the bad spelling was due to me being upset. ;)
Sorry but we as developers can't win either way on this one. You're damned if you do, and you are damned if you don't comply. We also decided NOT to make it an option, so it won't change.
btw, we really need a GNOME or fd.o decision on this topic ! My opinion is it's better to minimize :-)
Agreed, this is a bit of loose-loose situation. There are strong feelings both ways. It can be argued that an IM application is a bit different from other applications in that it's often started when you log in and running all the time in the background. However, this should as Xavier says, be decided on GNOME/fd.o level rather than in Gossip.
I guess you have listened to the loud complainers that have used other badly behaving IM apps instead of sticking to your guns. ;) But yes, this should be decided in the HIG. Reassign?
Never mind... go add yourself to CC in bug 140592 instead. :)
http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/gossip-dev/2004-April/001241.html "Until some guidelines comes from the usability team we are going to leave both the close button and the notification icon as is. If someone feels strongly about it, I suggest the correct place to make something happen is to get the usability team involved and reaching a decision." =)
"I guess you have listened to the loud complainers that have used other badly behaving IM apps instead of sticking to your guns. ;)" Well, you are really not any different from them you know ;) On a more serious note, the gossip contact list window shouldn't be considered a main window in the same sense as say a GEdit editor window. So consider the close button behaving as for a chat window (ie. the window gets destroyed but the application is running).
Touché. ;) But also on a more serious note. Don't you think this can give rise to usability problems? Like, say, users believing they aren't online when they still are. The first time notification helps somewhat but it has happened to me at least twice since I installed Edgy. Imagine people not used to computers... Anyways, I'm content with the "leave it as is until something has been decided on a higher level" answer.
Perhaps "Imagine people not used to computers" was a bad choice of words... but you know what I mean.
It's a tricky question for sure. There are several sides to this coin. 1) People who are new to computers. 2) People used to computers but not to other IM systems. 3) People used to other IM systems. As for how they would view on it 1) I'm not entirely sure that they would expect it to drop them from the IM network. The idea is to give the illusion that your "desktop" is connected, not a specific application. 2) My guess is that you would fit into this category? These are the ones that most often bring it up (and I'm coming from this background as well). They would expect that Gossip has a main window and that closing it would quit the application. 3) These people expect Gossip to behave like most other IM solutions out there, and they let you close the main window without quitting the application. Though this post doesn't much serve to help the situation, it's a description that it's not as easy as to just say "behave as all other applications out there". The fact is, many applications on the GNOME desktop doesn't have a main window. GEdit that I used before doesn't quit the application until all windows are closed (same for Epiphany, Gnome-terminal and others).
> The idea is to give the illusion that your "desktop" is connected, not > a specific application. This struck home with me. :) Though I'm not sure what's there now gives that illusion (it sort of feels like the contact list is the thing connected since that's the first window you see... or something). I'm also not quite sure what to do to improve it. As you said. Tricky.
Well, I should have rephrased that a bit, "the goal is to give the illusion...". :) Enabling support for Galago should give you a bit more of it though (it announces peoples presences to other applications). However I have never tested it myself. Also, Martyn has been hacking on a panel applet called Peekaboo that lets you send messages from the panel instead. This can improve a bit to make it more the central nav and then let it have an option to show/hide the contact list. But indeed, room for improvements for sure. And if you come up with things, feel free to submit them here in the issue tracker with the Severity set to Enhancement.